Microsoft Surface Ultra Laptop With Nvidia Chip Starts at $2,599

Microsoft on Wednesday officially launched the Surface Ultra, a high-end Windows laptop powered by Nvidia's RTX Spark chip, with a starting price of $2,599, according to Axios. The company is pitching the machine at people who want to run demanding AI workloads on the device itself rather than depend entirely on the cloud.

The Surface Ultra and similar Nvidia-powered laptops from other manufacturers will go on sale Oct. 16, Axios reported.

The key numbers behind the launch

• $2,599: the starting price of the Surface Ultra, a detail Microsoft left out when it previewed the laptop in June.
• Oct. 16: the date the Surface Ultra and Nvidia-powered models from other makers become available.
• June: when Microsoft first previewed the device, without giving price or exact availability.

What Microsoft announced in San Francisco

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Sriram Krishnan, a former White House AI official, appeared at the event, Axios reported. Huang said the companies had reinvented the computer as we know it.

Microsoft said in June that Nvidia-powered devices would also come from companies including Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo, among others. On the software side, it introduced a version of Copilot that can use local models alongside cloud-based ones. It also said Meta is bringing its Muse personal agent to Windows.

Why it matters for laptop buyers

The Surface Ultra is aimed at a premium tier, so the starting price puts it at the high end of the market. Microsoft's argument, as Axios described it, is that developers' appetite for AI exceeds what their companies' AI budgets can cover. The ideal, in this view, is a mix of frontier models in the cloud and local models when those work well enough.

Microsoft executive vice president Pavan Davuluri said hybrid intelligence exists because people's appetite for intelligence is effectively unlimited. For buyers, that means the laptops are designed to handle some AI tasks on the machine itself, though the sources do not give performance details.

Microsoft also spent time on security before turning to hardware, according to Axios. It said it is working to keep actions taken by AI agents separate from those taken by humans and to keep agents within preset limits.

A second try at the AI PC

Axios noted that Microsoft's first push into AI-powered Windows machines, known as Copilot+ PCs, got off to a rocky start after the delay of Recall, the program's signature feature. The new Nvidia-based line is the company's latest attempt to tie Windows more closely to the AI boom.

What happens next

The Surface Ultra and partner laptops are due to be available starting Oct. 16.

Source: Axios