Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra ships with Nvidia RTX silicon and a Copilot upgrade that gets file access and OS-level action control.
At its San Francisco Windows and Surface event, Microsoft detailed pricing and specs for the Surface Laptop Ultra, an AI PC built around Nvidia RTX chips designed to run local AI models and agents. Alongside it, Microsoft unveiled a Copilot upgrade granting access to local files and the ability to execute actions across Windows itself — part of a 'hybrid intelligence' push blending cloud and on-device compute.
Microsoft also opened preorders for the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a ~$6,000 Nvidia-powered developer machine shipping in November, undercutting none of Nvidia's own DGX Spark pricing but still signaling steep entry costs for local AI development hardware.
Microsoft is betting that agentic AI needs local compute and OS-level permissions, not just cloud APIs — a direct challenge to the browser-and-app model competitors like Google and Apple have favored. Giving Copilot file and action access also raises the security stakes IT leaders now have to underwrite before rollout.
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