Over the weekend, NVIDIA announced the NVIDIA RTX Spark, a new superchip that will power several Windows PCs later this year. The RTX Spark superchip features a 20-core NVIDIA Grace CPU and an NVIDIA Blackwell RTX GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores and fifth-generation Tensor Cores with FP4 precision, connected via the NVIDIA NVLink-C2C chip-to-chip interconnect for high performance.
Microsoft recently announced the Surface Laptop Ultra, a new flagship Surface device powered by this new NVIDIA RTX Spark chipset. To take things to the next level, at Build 2026, Microsoft also unveiled the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box. Powered by the NVIDIA RTX Spark, this new desktop workstation delivers up to one petaflop of AI compute and comes with 128GB of unified memory. According to Microsoft, it can run models with up to 120 billion parameters locally, significantly reducing the need to rely on cloud GPU instances.
To achieve maximum performance, the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box features an anodized aluminum 3D-printed body with 1,000 air vents built into its grid chassis. Microsoft mentioned that the 1,000 air vents are a nod to its 1,000 teraflops of compute performance. The company also highlighted that the 100W thermal envelope inside the aluminum chassis doubles as a cooling system.
When it comes to connectivity, the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box includes two USB-C ports, a USB-A port, HDMI, Ethernet, and a headphone jack.
For developers, the device will ship with Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2), native GPU passthrough, and full CUDA support pre-configured. It will also come with development tools, including Visual Studio Code, PowerShell 7, and GitHub Copilot pre-installed.
Microsoft says the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box will be available later this year in the US. Interested developers can sign-up for the waitlist here.
7 Comments
Load the comments and join the conversation!
Read the comments, ask the editors questions, show respect and join the conversation.