Back in June, Nvidia revealed it had locked in deals with Microsoft and several other PC manufacturers to build AI- and agent-capable Windows machines powered by its RTX Spark chip. At the time, though, specifics about these computers were hard to come by.

That changed on Wednesday. During an event in San Francisco held as part of the city's Tech Week, Microsoft pulled back the curtain on the specifications and pricing for its new Surface Laptop Ultra. Two base configurations are on offer: one starting at $2,600, and another featuring a more powerful chip beginning at $3,700. From there, prices climb as buyers add more memory and storage, reaching as high as $5,900. According to Microsoft, the top-tier model has already sold out.

Microsoft also took the wraps off a new workstation built around the RTX Spark chip — the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box — which carries a starting price of $6,000 and ships with Microsoft development tools including VS Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, WSL, and PowerShell 7. The core appeal of both the laptop and the workstation is their ability to run AI models locally on the device, at no cost, leveraging the CPU, GPU, unified memory, and other hardware tweaks such as enhanced cooling that are needed to support them. On top of that, both run a refreshed version of Windows 11 featuring something called "Execution Containers," which the company says makes it simpler to sandbox AI agents. This capability will be rolled out to all Windows 11 users, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who spoke at the event.

Nadella put it this way: "One of the things we realized in the last 3-4 years is that just having a model doesn't do much for anything. You really do need to orchestrate, and you need to have memory outside of the model. You need to have this harnessed layer that is able to take multiple models plus context, plus memory, and the action space."

He went on to say that Microsoft is making this possible "not just for our apps but apps for anyone's agent. That's what the Windows platform is all about going forward."

These devices are unmistakably targeted at developers — so much so that Microsoft is dangling up to $1,000 off for anyone who trades in a MacBook Pro, since Macs have grown into a favored machine among developers and AI agent fans, especially in Silicon Valley. Even so, the company promises these Surface PCs, with their formidable graphics processing power, can also handle content creation, video processing, and gaming.

Microsoft wasn't alone in unveiling specs for its new Nvidia RTX Spark AI Windows PCs on Wednesday. Dell likewise shared the details of its previously teased Dell XPS 16 Creator Edition PC. It's now available for pre-order ahead of a late October delivery at Best Buy, with a price tag of $3,800.