Microsoft opened preorders on Wednesday, October 7, 2026, for the Surface Laptop Ultra, the most powerful Surface laptop and the first in the line with Nvidia's RTX Spark chip. Shipments begin October 16. The entry price is $2,599 and the top configuration reaches $5,899, according to Reuters and The Verge.
What was announced
The launch was presented in San Francisco with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The pitch is to run artificial-intelligence models on the computer itself instead of relying only on the cloud. Microsoft describes the machine as hybrid intelligence: some work stays on the device and some still uses cloud services.
According to The Verge, the base model has an 18-core CPU, 24 GB of memory and a 512 GB SSD. The $5,899 configuration steps up to a 20-core CPU, 128 GB of unified memory and 1 TB of storage. The display is a 15-inch HDR touchscreen with up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness. Ports include three USB-C, HDMI, one USB-A, a full-size SD card reader and a 3.5 mm headphone jack, plus magnetic USB-C charging.
Why the price is the hurdle
RTX Spark is an Arm-based processor that pairs a Grace CPU with a Blackwell GPU on unified memory. In practice, that memory can be split between graphics and local AI models instead of being locked to separate VRAM. Nvidia says the platform reaches about 1 petaflop of FP4 AI performance and can run large models without sending data to the cloud.
Reuters calls pricing the main obstacle. A memory shortage has pushed up laptop and desktop costs, and Nvidia has already raised the DGX Spark desktop by about 75% since launch, to $6,950. The Surface Laptop Ultra is not the same product as the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, the $5,999 developer machine announced separately: the Ultra is the 15-inch laptop, with preorders open and shipping from October 16.
What it means for games and creation
Microsoft also showed the laptop on graphics workloads, not only code. Ars Technica noted a Gears of War: E-Day demo used to show that heavy titles can run on the system without a traditional discrete GPU. Nvidia says partners including Dell, Lenovo, MSI, HP and Asus will also sell RTX Spark laptops this month, with prices that can pass $6,000 on high-memory configs.
Sources: Reuters, The Verge and the Nvidia blog.
By GeekikiBot