Microsoft has opened pre-orders for its new Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, introducing two high-performance Surface devices built around NVIDIA’s RTX Spark Superchip and designed for demanding creative, development, and artificial intelligence workloads.
The Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599 and will become available beginning October 16, 2026. Microsoft’s Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is priced at $5,999 and is available for pre-order exclusively through Microsoft.com in the United States, with shipments scheduled to begin in November.
Both devices are part of Microsoft’s broader push toward what it describes as hybrid intelligence, combining local PC processing with cloud computing while allowing more AI workloads to run directly on users’ hardware.
Microsoft designed Surface Laptop Ultra around NVIDIA RTX Spark, combining an NVIDIA Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 6,144 cores, an NVIDIA Grace CPU with up to 20 cores and as much as 128 GB of unified system memory.
The system can support AI models exceeding 120 billion parameters locally and deliver up to 1 petaflop of theoretical AI performance using FP4 and sparsity.
Microsoft is positioning the laptop for creators, developers and AI builders who need substantial local compute capabilities without relying exclusively on cloud infrastructure.
The company said it worked closely with NVIDIA to optimize Windows for the RTX Spark Superchip before designing Surface Laptop Ultra’s mechanical, electrical, thermal and acoustic systems around the platform.
Surface Laptop Ultra includes a newly developed thermal architecture that can deliver up to 2.5 times the thermal power capacity of Microsoft’s current Surface laptops.
Despite the performance-focused design, Microsoft said the device is less than 18 millimeters thick and weighs under 4.5 pounds.
The laptop features a 15-inch PixelSense Ultra touchscreen that Microsoft describes as the brightest and sharpest display it has offered on a Surface Laptop.
Peak HDR brightness reaches 2,000 nits under specified conditions, and Microsoft said that represents up to 25% higher peak HDR brightness than published specifications for Apple’s MacBook Pro M5 Pro as of October 1, 2026.
The touchpad is approximately 30% larger than the one on the Surface Laptop 8th Edition and includes advanced haptics.
Microsoft is also making storage user-removable, allowing customers to replace, upgrade, or secure their own storage where supported.
Connectivity includes Microsoft’s new Magnetic Connect technology, which the company describes as the world’s first built-in magnetic USB-C charging implementation on a laptop.
The included charging cable magnetically connects to a USB-C port and can detach easily while leaving the port available for conventional USB-C video, data and accessory use.
Surface Laptop Ultra also includes two additional USB-C ports, HDMI, USB-A, an SD card reader and a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack.
The laptop can drive as many as three 4K external displays.
Microsoft is targeting developers with support for local AI models, GitHub Copilot and agentic coding workflows that can operate directly on the device. Developers can use the available memory and GPU resources to prototype agents, review code and test larger models locally.
For gaming and graphics applications, the NVIDIA architecture also supports ray tracing, DLSS and NVIDIA Reflex in compatible titles.
The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box uses the same RTX Spark Superchip platform but is designed as a compact desktop AI development system rather than a mobile computer.
Microsoft said the system targets AI engineers, software developers and technical teams that want substantial local computing capacity for inference, evaluation, experimentation and agent workloads.
The Dev Box also offers up to 1 petaflop of AI performance and 128 GB of unified memory and supports AI models exceeding 120 billion parameters with large context windows.
As part of Microsoft’s Project Zenith device family, the system ships with development tools and environments including Visual Studio Code, Git, GitHub CLI, GitHub Copilot, Windows Subsystem for Linux, Python and Node.
Microsoft is also connecting the new hardware with its emerging agent infrastructure.
Microsoft Execution Containers are intended to provide containment for agents, while upcoming Windows capabilities are expected to use Microsoft Entra to differentiate agent activity from actions performed directly by users.
Microsoft Agent 365 controls are also expected to extend to locally running agents.
The company said this combination is designed to give organizations greater control over AI access, computing resources and costs while allowing developers to shift workloads between local hardware and Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure when additional capacity is required.
Commercial configurations of Surface Laptop Ultra are also available for pre-order.
Microsoft is directly targeting professional MacBook users with the launch, offering as much as $1,000 in cash back for customers who purchase a qualifying Surface Laptop Ultra and trade in an eligible MacBook Pro under the terms of its promotional program.
