Microsoft just announced the Surface Laptop Ultra at Computex 2026, and it kills the old playbook. This is not a thin-and-light for email.
It is a 1-petaflop AI workstation in a sub-18 mm chassis, co-engineered with NVIDIA around the newly announced RTX Spark chip. The RTX Spark silicon pairs a Blackwell RTX GPU with a 20-core Grace CPU connected through NVIDIA's NVLink chip-to-chip interface. The result: up to 128 GB of unified memory shared dynamically between CPU and GPU, letting AI models, 3D renders and multi-workload pipelines run simultaneously without hitting memory walls. At peak, the machine runs models with up to 120 billion parameters locally. No cloud tether.
Microsoft's Brett Ostrum, Corporate Vice President, framed the target audience bluntly in the official announcement: "For those building the systems, the breakthroughs and the infrastructure the world runs on and gets changed by. The ones who see limits as flaws and have the vision to push past them." The 15-inch mini-LED PixelSense Ultra display hits 2,000 nits peak HDR brightness with 262 pixels per inch. Microsoft calls it the brightest screen it has ever shipped on a Surface. The touchpad is more than 30% larger than the previous generation with haptic feedback. Port selection includes HDMI, USB-C, USB-A, a full-size SD card reader and a headphone jack.
Microsoft also built in a user-replaceable SSD. Adobe has rearchitected Premiere Pro and Photoshop for RTX Spark. Premiere gets a new video pipeline targeting real-time editing and GPU-accelerated color correction.
Photoshop gains a next-generation engine for GPU-accelerated compositing and live filters. Blender, DaVinci Resolve, Cinema 4D, CapCut, Topaz Photo and Affinity by Canva all run natively. For x86-dependent software, Microsoft's Prism emulator now supports RTX Spark's GPU. On the gaming side, League of Legends, Valorant, PUBG and Alan Wake 2 have confirmed support. Compatibility will depend on a mix of native Arm builds, Prism emulation and anti-cheat support, given RTX Spark is a Windows on Arm platform. The chassis comes in at under 18 mm thick and under 2 kg. Two color options: Platinum and a new Nightfall finish.
Pricing is unannounced. The Surface Laptop Ultra ships later in 2026.
