GoKawiilI can’t remember the last time Microsoft kicked off a Build keynote with Windows front and center, but that’s exactly what CEO Satya Nadella did this week. Nadella didn’t address the issues Microsoft is trying to fix in Windows 11 but chose to woo the audience with Microsoft’s slick Surface RTX Spark Dev Kit instead, calling it a “dream machine.”
Nadella unveiled the new Surface hardware just days after Nvidia officially returned to Windows on Arm with its new RTX Spark chips. Both companies are talking up these chips as some kind of new beginning for PCs, and it’s clear that RTX Spark will drive local AI workloads in a way that Microsoft’s previous Copilot Plus PCs haven’t yet managed.
Build really drove home that message this week, with Windows positioned as an all-important part of Microsoft’s AI agent efforts. Microsoft’s original mission under Bill Gates was a computer on every desk and in every home, and Nadella reframed that as “unmetered intelligence on every desk and in every home” within a few minutes of his keynote beginning.
It set the stage for Microsoft and Nvidia to position their new Windows PCs as a potential solution for costly, usage-based pricing of cloud-based AI models. As local compute grows in capability, there’s a clear gap that Microsoft and Nvidia can fill with powerful hardware you actually own.
“I think we, as Microsoft, have the responsibility for building the best possible AI stack that we can on [Windows], and obviously drive the best AI stack that we can in the cloud,” says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri in an interview with Notepad. Davuluri thinks that Microsoft is in a good position to capitalize on hybrid compute, where chips like the RTX Spark will handle a lot of local workloads and intelligently hand off to the cloud when they need something more powerful.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is even more bullish about local AI compute. He wants to turn PCs into devices that work for you, eliminating that idle time when PCs are switched off or you’re not using them. “In the future, if I need my laptop to do something, I just text it with WhatsApp,” said Huang earlier this week. “You don’t want to necessarily run everything in the cloud, because if you can run it locally, it’s free.”
Nadella seems to agree. “The amount of compute that there is at the edge is astounding,” he said during his Build keynote. “Every PC, if you sort of aggregate that, that’s a lot of compute power.”
That power is really on display with Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chips, which will come to a variety of creator-focused laptops and miniature PCs later this year. RTX Spark is capable of running a 120 billion parameter large language model locally, allowing many AI workloads to run without ever touching the cloud. That’s an appealing concept during a continued AI money squeeze for developers and consumers.
Microsoft is targeting its own Surface Laptop Ultra at developers and creators and pairing it with ongoing improvements to Windows 11 performance and developer-friendly additions. While Microsoft’s deeper embrace of Linux utilities inside Windows this week didn’t generate the same gleeful audience reaction as the Windows Terminal announcement in 2019, developers I’ve spoken to are excited by the Coreutils and WSL containers additions.
The Surface Laptop Ultra has also been generating some buzz, particularly among developers and power users. Microsoft isn’t quite positioning this as a mainstream premium laptop, but there’s certainly room for it to appeal far beyond developers. “I think you’ll see us do well when it comes to STEM applications, and CAD apps running on the platform, because they take advantage of the same characteristic patterns of high-performance compute,” explains Davuluri.
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