Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled its latest effort to run AI in PCs powered by its Windows software, rather than running the AI in the cloud, which the company said would bring down costs for customers. #Artificial Intelligence #Gadgets
The announcement is Microsoft’s response to Apple’s Mac Mini, which has become a hit with AI customers and app developers because of its ability to run models directly on the device. Microsoft is also trying to show enterprise customers that AI can run securely on company-owned computers.
Microsoft said its forthcoming Surface computers powered by Nvidia chips, which the company previewed earlier this year, will start at $2,599, while a more powerful PC, Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, will start at $5,999. An even more powerful Nvidia-powered PC, DGX Station, will be capable of running large AI models (with as many as 1 trillion parameters, or settings tied to the model) on the device, such as Meta’s Llama 4 Maverick or DeepSeek’s V4-Flash. It will also be capable of streaming complex videogames like Call of Duty from the cloud starting next year. Microsoft didn’t disclose pricing or say when the device would be available.
Microsoft also said its Copilot AI software will use a model router to automatically run some AI tasks to run locally on the Nvidia-powered PCs, using Microsoft’s relatively cheap MAI-Code-1.1 model, for instance. And Windows customers will be able to direct Copilot to generate custom applications, such as desktop widgets or webpage prototypes, that the PC can host locally on their device, further driving down costs, the company said. Finally, Microsoft said it was adding new governance controls to Windows to let companies control how employees’ own AI agents, such as those powered by OpenClaw or Perplexity, can access certain files. The features will become available in Windows 11 later this month.
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