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Nvidia is launching RTX Spark laptops on October 16th, its first major push into Arm-powered Windows PCs since the ill-fated Surface RT. The company says these machines will run existing Windows software including Adobe, Office, Blender, and games with kernel-level anti-cheat, alongside local AI workstation capabilities with up to 128GB of RAM.
Adobe VP Deepa Subramaniam said the company has rearchitected Photoshop, Premiere and Substance 3D Painter to run on NVIDIA's new RTX Spark system-on-chip, which brings local AI processing to Windows laptops and small desktops aimed at creatives. Subramaniam claims the optimized apps run twice as fast on AI-driven tasks and general editing workflows, with improvements including real-time previews in Photoshop, faster rendering and color-grading in Premiere, and quicker texturing and file handling in Substance 3D Painter.
A Washington Post list shows six major tech firms — Apple, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta — contributed a combined $92 million toward construction of a White House ballroom. Apple and Nvidia each gave $25 million, Google gave $22 million, Microsoft and Palantir each gave $10 million, and Amazon and Meta gave $5 million apiece. Overall, tech and crypto industry donors reportedly provided more than $150 million to the project.
Nvidia released Broadcast 2.3, introducing a beta Eye Contact effect that adjusts a speaker's gaze to simulate eye contact with the camera, plus a new Vignette effect that can be paired with Background Blur for a bokeh-style look. The update also brings enhanced Virtual Background effects usable directly in OBS, Streamlabs and Elgato Camera Hub via updated redistributables. Nvidia says Broadcast's active users have doubled year over year, with over 20 partners integrating its effects and several laptop makers preinstalling it.
Speaking to CNBC at a London media briefing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company 'absolutely must' cooperate with Chinese AI companies to monitor risks from the technology. He said he already holds dialogues with researchers in China and urged the US and UK to pursue similar engagement.
Nvidia and Microsoft launched the RTX Spark line of laptops, which pair an Arm-based CPU with a Blackwell GPU and unified memory to run AI models locally. Microsoft built a new 'Get Started' flow in Windows that lets users find, install and launch an AI agent in two clicks, with agents distributed and updated through the Windows Store. Hermes, Perplexity, and OpenClaw are the first supported agents, with more expected to follow.
Apple's stock rose 0.5% to close at $342.96, pushing its market valuation to $5.01 trillion, the first time the company has ended a trading day above that threshold after six prior intraday crossings. The close came even as most major tech stocks, including Oracle, Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and Google, finished the day lower.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 continued its second day at San Francisco's Moscone West, featuring an Expo Hall with over 300 startups, live pitch sessions, and AI-based matchmaking for an audience exceeding 10,000 founders, investors and tech leaders. Speakers on day two included representatives from Nvidia, Waabi, Flock Safety, Ricursive Intelligence and Benchmark, covering topics such as robotics, AI hardware, public safety and venture funding.
On October 11, 1999, Nvidia shipped the GeForce 256, the first product it labeled a 'GPU,' featuring a hardware transform-and-lighting engine. Offloading graphics work from the CPU wasn't new—Commodore and 3dfx had done similar things earlier—but Nvidia coined and popularized the GPU term with this release. The card particularly benefited systems with weaker CPUs like low-end Celerons.
The International Monetary Fund's latest Global Financial Stability Report warns that the global economy's growing dependence on AI-related capital flows could harm GDP, investment, and consumption by 2028 if the sector crashes. The report distinguishes between 'core' AI firms like Nvidia and TSMC, which have years of production already booked, and weaker non-core players whose circular financing arrangements pose broader risk. The IMF found $300 billion invested in financially weaker AI companies plus $650 billion in debt tied to $1.4 trillion in revenue, concentrated among a small number of firms.
A Reddit user posted photos showing Japanese retail prices for Nvidia RTX 50-series graphics cards running 5.66% to 41.1% higher than equivalent Amazon US listings, with the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB showing the steepest markup. The comparison, converted at current exchange rates, found RTX 5080 cards averaging a 12.71% premium over US pre-tax prices, with the gap narrowing to under 4% when an 8.5% US sales tax is factored in. Notably, the RTX 5090 was absent from the Japanese listings entirely.
Ukrainian developer Valery Kryzhanovsky posted a video applying a leaked build of Nvidia's DLSS 5 to the original 1996 Quake, using ReShade and RenoDX to inject the AI effect as a post-process over DOSBox's rendered frames rather than integrating it into the game engine. The 4x Multipass technique was used to intensify the effect, though Kryzhanovsky and observers note the results look poor. This follows earlier experiments by the same modder applying leaked DLSS 5 to 2D games like Duke Nukem and Pac-Man.