Microsoft opened preorders for the Surface Laptop Ultra at $2,599, with shipments beginning October 16, Pavan Davuluri, executive vice president of Windows and devices, announced at a San Francisco event on Wednesday. The 15-inch laptop is the company's most powerful Surface ever and its first built around Nvidia's RTX Spark superchip — an Arm-based design pairing a Grace CPU (up to 20 cores) with a Blackwell RTX GPU. Configurations run up to 128GB of unified memory and a petaflop of AI compute, with the top model priced at $5,899.99 according to 24/7 Wall St. The Verge reports the base unit ships with an 18-core CPU, 24GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.

Microsoft claims the Surface Laptop Ultra returns prompts from locally run AI models twice as fast as Apple's MacBook Pro M5 and generates video six times quicker, though The Next Web reports the company published no test methodology for either claim. Tom's Hardware cites more precise onstage figures: up to 2.1 times faster to first token, 4.3 times faster image generation and 6.2 times faster video generation versus the M5 Pro. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the Blackwell RTX Spark GPU has as much processing power as the 2016 DGX-1 data center server that cost $250 million. Microsoft is also offering up to $1,000 back for trading in an eligible MacBook Pro, per The Times of India.

The machine's real purpose is running large AI models locally without cloud bills: the Times of India reports the 128GB variant can hold Microsoft's compressed MAI Code 1.1 Flash model, which peaks at 75.5GB with its full 256K context window, and models exceeding 120 billion parameters. Satya Nadella framed the stakes, saying Microsoft 'needed to make the desktop the most secure place for agents to execute,' with Windows 11's Microsoft Execution Containers sandboxing agent access. But cost is the barrier: analyst Anshel Sag of Moor Insights told 24/7 Wall St. that 'now the software is ready and the hardware is too expensive to actually run it locally.'

Alongside the laptop, the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box mini PC is available for preorder at $5,999, shipping in November, per The Verge, and Meta's Muse AI agent is coming to Windows with no timeline announced. Microsoft is updating Windows 11 setup to get users started with open-source OpenClaw agent software, and GitHub Copilot will start splitting tasks between local and cloud models on these machines later this month, according to The Times of India. The Next Web cautions the market is shrinking: European laptop shipments are forecast to fall 6.4% this quarter as memory costs rise, and Gartner does not expect AI PCs to be a majority of shipments until 2028.