SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft and Nvidia put the Surface Laptop Ultra on stage Wednesday, the first Surface built around Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip and the companies’ bid to run artificial-intelligence agents on the laptop instead of in a data center.
Chief executives Satya Nadella and Jensen Huang introduced the machine at a Microsoft event billed as an update to Windows and the Surface line. Microsoft first showed the laptop at Computex in Taipei in June: a 15-inch mini-LED screen, up to 128 gigabytes of memory, and a chip Nvidia built with MediaTek that pairs as many as 20 processor cores with a Blackwell graphics processor. Microsoft says it reaches up to one petaflop of AI performance. Configurations reported ahead of the event run from an 18-core part with 24 gigabytes to a 20-core part with as much as 128 gigabytes of unified memory and 6,144 graphics cores.
The software case is the one Microsoft made at its Build conference in June and again last month, when it bundled agents into a new Copilot app. Agents are systems meant to take a task — writing and testing code, working through a business project — and keep going. Putting that on the device would move some of the load off Azure and onto the customer’s machine. Reuters noted the open question is whether those agents can be contained safely on a personal computer.
Price is the other question, and the one analysts called the largest. Microsoft had not published a tag or a ship date before the event. Reports put the start well above $2,000 and the top configurations from under $3,000 to more than $7,000. Nvidia recently raised the price of its DGX Spark, a small AI desktop with 128 gigabytes of memory, by about 75 percent to $6,950. The AI laptops Microsoft promoted two years ago mostly cost under $2,000.
“Now the software is ready, and the hardware is too expensive to actually run it locally,” Anshel Sag, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told Reuters. The gap is memory. A shortage has lifted the cost of laptops and desktops, and a machine with workstation-class unified memory is the expensive end of that shortage.
A haptic trackpad, reported about 30 percent larger than the one on the 15-inch Surface Laptop 8, is the ordinary laptop detail in a spec sheet otherwise written for a cluster. Pre-orders were expected around the event, with shipments aimed at the second half of October. Until Microsoft posts the price, the Ultra is a claim: one petaflop, agents on the device, and a bill that Sag says may keep them in the cloud anyway.
