Two new machines in San Francisco
Back in June, Nvidia announced partnerships with Microsoft and several PC makers to build AI- and agent-ready Windows PCs on its RTX Spark chip, but details were scarce. Wednesday's event filled in the specs and prices: the Surface Laptop Ultra and the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box.
Dev workstation at $6,000
The compact Surface RTX Spark Dev Box workstation starts at $6,000 and ships with VS Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and PowerShell 7 — an out-of-the-box environment for building, testing, and running AI applications. The target user is clear: developers who want to run AI apps locally.
Local AI models, no cloud bill
The core selling point of both machines is running AI models on-device "for free." The CPU, GPU, unified memory, and cooling designed for heavy workloads make local inference possible without paying per-call cloud fees — a real cost equation for developers who iterate on models all day.
A new OS feature sandboxes AI agents
Microsoft also showed a revamped Windows 11 featuring "Execution Containers," which isolate AI agents inside sandboxes while they perform tasks. CEO Satya Nadella said at the event that the feature will be available to all Windows 11 users, not just buyers of the new Surface devices. "One of the things we realized in the last 3-4 years is that just having a model doesn't do much for anything," Nadella explained. "You really do need to orchestrate, and you need to have memory outside of the model. You need to have this harnessed layer that is able to take multiple models plus context, plus memory, and the action space."
