Microsoft and Nvidia unveil Surface Laptop Ultra with Grace Blackwell chip at San Francisco event

Microsoft and Nvidia took the stage in San Francisco on October 7 to introduce the Surface Laptop Ultra, a machine built around Nvidia’s RTX Spark platform and the Grace Blackwell superchip. The announcement marks the first significant refresh to Windows hardware and Surface devices since May 2024, and it arrived with both CEOs present: Satya Nadella and Jensen Huang sharing the spotlight. The core pitch is straightforward: run serious AI workloads on the laptop itself, no cloud subscription required. That matters because cloud AI compute costs money every time you use it, and it sends your data somewhere else. A machine that handles the heavy lifting locally changes both the economics and the privacy calculus. What’s actually inside this thing The Surface Laptop Ultra ships with either an 18- or 20-core Grace CPU paired with a Blackwell GPU carrying up to 6,144 CUDA cores. Memory tops out at 128 GB of unified LPDDR5X, which is a spec you’d normally associate with a workstation, not a laptop you can carry onto a plane. AI performance is rated at approximately 1 petaflop of FP4 compute. To put that in practical terms, it means the machine can run models with up to 120 billion parame...