Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has sung the praises of Microsoft's new Surface Laptop Ultra, describing it as "so beautiful" and "incredible".
Speaking at a developer event in London, Huang outlined the development process that went into building the hardware powering the new product, which is the first Microsoft device powered by an Nvidia chip.
“This computer is going to be incredible - it took us four years to build it," Huang told attendees including TechRadar Pro, "this project is really a work of love - we had several thousand engineering years dedicated to it, we build a brand new revolutionary chip, a whole new line of PCs, it’s so beautiful - you’re going to love it.”
The end of the traditional PC?
Revealed in September 2026, the Surface Laptop Ultra is targeted towards developer and AI usage, powered by Nvidia’s RTX Spark platform with an N1X processor and RTX Blackwell graphics, supporting up to 128GB unified memory
This is alongside 24GB RAM and 512GB storage, while the next version has 32GB RAM and 1TB storage, making it ideal for creators, AI specialists, engineers, scientists, developers, and other users running demanding applications.
But as Huang tells it, the creation of the device, set to launch on October 16 2026, was a long and arduous process.
“It took four years to do this," Huang said of the hardware development process. "We were thinking about agentic systems, AI and autonomous systems, and how they’ll be able to access your files, and be grounded on information, and be able to reason about it and use tools - but the ultimate tool is your personal computer, right?"
"So wouldn’t it be cool if we could create a personal computer, a PC that actually runs an agent locally - so it can go off and just work on things for you - and not only could it just run locally, it would be smart enough to use the tools."
Huang explained his vision of "texting" your PC to ask for help, to get it to do tasks like rendering images and updating slides, then delivering them straight to you.
"Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could just text your computer - you don’t have to bring it with you anymore - just leave it at your desk!”
“So we created this thing - it took us four years to do it, so I called Satya (Nadella, Microsoft CEO), and the two of us talked about it…and so we had to create a brand new chip, we had to wait until Blackwell was done - and this thing has 1 petaflops of computing, and because we knew the models were going to be big, we had to redesign how the GPU uses memory - so this is the first Nvidia GPU with shared memory, one petaflops, Blackwell architecture - and also it has to run everything a PC doesn’t.”
“There’s three types of PCs, right," Huang outlined, "there’s the PC that basically you use to type in - that’s called a PC, there’s the Nvidia gaming PC, you’ve got GeForce in that, and you’ve got the Nvidia workstations that runs all kinds of applications…so we figured that if you’re going to have an AI go use the tools, it should be able to use every single tool…it runs everything, it runs every AI framework, it runs any AI model as well."
