Nvidia opens RTX Spark laptop preorders, available Oct. 16

Nvidia opened preorders Wednesday for Windows laptops built on its RTX Spark chip, which Nvidia said will be available Oct. 16. The company announced the preorders in a blog post timed to a Microsoft Windows AI and Surface event in San Francisco.

Compact RTX Spark desktops will go on sale in November, Nvidia said. At the same event, the company previewed DGX Station for Windows, which it calls the first deskside AI supercomputer built for the Windows enterprise desktop. Nvidia only previewed that system; its post gives no ship date or price, and it invites customers to sign up to be told when it is available.

RTX Spark pairs an Nvidia Blackwell RTX GPU with an Nvidia Grace CPU, and Nvidia is pitching it as a way to run large AI models and always-on agents on a PC rather than in the cloud. RTX Spark puts Nvidia’s own CPU, not just its GPU, inside Windows laptops.

Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Windows and Devices, said the company built its new Surface Laptop Ultra around RTX Spark. “With up to 128 gigs of unified memory and up to a petaflop of AI compute, you can run models on this laptop that simply don’t fit on a traditional machine,” Davuluri said, according to Nvidia’s post. Microsoft’s own Surface blog says memory varies by configuration and that the petaflop figure is a theoretical FP4 number using a sparsity feature, so it is a theoretical peak, not a measured figure.

Microsoft also announced general availability of Microsoft Execution Containers, or MXC, the OS-level infrastructure that lets agents run safely and persistently in the background, under operating system control, according to Nvidia’s post.

Systems are coming from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, MSI and Gigabyte, according to Nvidia, in designs ranging from slim laptops to compact desktops.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella appeared together at the event in a fireside chat. “If not for Windows there would be no GeForce,” Huang said, pointing to Nvidia’s decades on the platform.

Nvidia’s post does not list prices for RTX Spark systems.

What’s next

Laptops are scheduled to become available Oct. 16, and compact desktops are due in November. Watch for a ship date and pricing for DGX Station for Windows, which Nvidia has so far only previewed, and for whether PC makers beyond the eight Nvidia named add RTX Spark designs.

— Nico Valdez