SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft will unveil on Wednesday a new laptop powered by Nvidia’s chips, seeking to turn Windows into a platform for AI agents to handle tasks such as writing code without having to access the cloud, analysts said. For Microsoft, the move represents a bet that some work that currently takes place in its costly Azure cloud computing data centers can be shifted to high-powered Windows machines in businesses and homes, a market where the Redmond, Washington-based firm retains a stronghold — and where its customers foot the hardware bills. It is a market opportunity that longtime rival Apple is also chasing with new Mac computers. For Nvidia, cracking the Windows PC market could help it go after one of the last major markets dominated by its longtime rivals Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. The Microsoft-hosted event in San Francisco, which the company billed as an update on its Windows operating system and Surface line of hardware, will be the culmination of years of work between the flagship operating system maker for PCs and the AI chip company to bring many tasks such as writing computer code or tackling complex business projects directly to desktops and laptops with Nvidia’s RTX Spark chips announced in June. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will take the stage to introduce the Surface Laptop Ultra, as the new machine will be called. One of the key challenges for Microsoft and Nvidia will be to show that agents, the long-running AI systems that can tackle complex problems on their own, can be safely contained on personal computers. Nvidia is already trying to prevent a repeat of the hack of AI hub Hugging Face, while Apple is looking to tighten up the process for giving AI agents full access to a Mac computer’s hard drive. But analysts said the biggest question will be the price of the new offerings after a memory-chip crunch has driven up prices for desktop and laptop machines. When Microsoft originally pitched the idea of running AI tasks on PCs two years ago to save on costs, the laptops were mostly priced below US$2,000, but in recent weeks, Nvidia increased the price of an AI desktop machine called the DGX Spark by about 75 per cent to US$6,950, thanks to the surging costs of its 128 gigabytes of memory. Anshel Sag, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told Reuters that the memory prices are affecting both Apple and Microsoft’s efforts. Two years ago, “the software wasn’t ready, but the hardware was. Now the software is ready and the hardware is too expensive to actually run it locally,” Sag said. “So it’s becoming this thing where only the people who have the budget can really afford to run AI locally.” --- Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman
