Microsoft and Nvidia executives take the stage in San Francisco today to make the case that artificial intelligence is moving off the cloud and onto the PC itself. CEO Satya Nadella, Windows and Devices chief Pavan Davuluri, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang are scheduled to appear together at an event billed as covering "the latest innovations across Windows, Nvidia RTX Spark, Surface and the broader PC ecosystem," according to Microsoft's event registration page.
The centerpiece is RTX Spark, an Arm-based Nvidia chip built to run large AI models directly on a laptop or desktop rather than in a data center. Nvidia and its PC partners first showed RTX Spark hardware at IFA Berlin last month, with machines built around the chip due in stores this month. Microsoft's own Surface Laptop Ultra, previewed at its Build developer conference in June, is expected to get its first full public pricing and specs today, alongside a workstation-style Surface RTX Spark Dev Box aimed at developers building AI applications that run without an internet connection.
The pitch to buyers is speed, privacy and reliability: an AI assistant that keeps running, and keeps data on the device, even without a connection to Microsoft's or Nvidia's servers. Industry analysts expect RTX Spark machines to carry a steep premium over conventional Windows laptops, positioning them as a direct answer to Apple's Mac lineup built around its M5 Ultra and M6 chips, which Apple has marketed on similar on-device AI capabilities.
Today's event is Microsoft's first major standalone Windows showcase in more than two years and arrives weeks after the company began rolling out Windows 11 version 26H2 to Insiders; executives are expected to confirm a wider public release of that update. The San Francisco gathering also sets the stage for Microsoft's Ignite conference, scheduled for the same city November 17–20, where the company typically details AI tools for business customers. For now, the open questions are price and availability: neither company has said what an RTX Spark machine will cost, only that, as industry previews of the event have put it, it "will likely be quite expensive."
