Microsoft has launched the Surface Laptop Ultra, a 15-inch Surface powered by the NVIDIA’s RTX Spark superchip, with up to 128GB of unified memory and up to one petaflop of AI compute, enough to run AI models with up to 120 billion parameters locally. Microsoft says it’s “the most powerful Surface Laptop ever built.”

All of these fit inside a chassis that’s less than 18mm thick and weighs under 4.5 pounds, with a mini-LED display that reaches 2,000 nits. Finally, Microsoft has a Surface Laptop built to take on the MacBook Pro.

The Surface Laptop Ultra launches at a starting price of $2599.

Surface Laptop Ultra packs NVIDIA RTX Spark into a surprisingly thin Surface

RTX Spark puts NVIDIA’s Grace Arm CPU and a Blackwell RTX GPU on a single superchip. The top configuration has 20 CPU cores and 6,144 CUDA cores, with 32GB, 48GB, 64GB, or 128GB of memory. The 18-core model drops to 5,120 GPU cores and 24GB or 32GB.

The CPU and GPU share this unified memory, so a large AI model can use far more of it than the VRAM on a typical gaming laptop. RTX Spark also supports CUDA natively, which means developers don’t have to give up NVIDIA’s AI tooling to use an Arm laptop.

Microsoft changed Windows to keep up. They rebuilt the Windows 11 task scheduler with Workload Profile Scheduling to spread work across those 20 cores, and developed the Microsoft Power and Thermal Framework with NVIDIA to sustain performance without the laptop running hot.

The Surface Laptop Ultra has the display and design to challenge the MacBook Pro

The 15-inch mini-LED PixelSense Ultra touchscreen has a 3:2 aspect ratio, 262 PPI, up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness, and Dolby Vision support. The haptic touchpad is over 30% larger than the one on the 15-inch Surface Laptop, and you can pick Platinum or a new Nightfall finish.

Don’t let the thin chassis fool you, because Microsoft didn’t skimp on the ports. You get three USB-C ports, USB-A, HDMI, a full-size SD card reader, and a 3.5mm headphone jack (the MacBook Pro still has no USB-A).

Inside, the cooling system has up to 2.5 times the thermal capacity of the 15-inch Surface Laptop 7th Edition, which should help it sustain long AI workloads.

RTX Spark is why Microsoft thinks Windows can fight the MacBook Pro

Until now, developers who wanted lots of unified memory for local AI usually ended up with a MacBook Pro or Mac Studio, while those who needed CUDA were stuck with bulky gaming laptops or desktops. Surface Laptop Ultra gives both in one portable machine, while also looking arguably better than a MacBook Pro.

Yes, there’s no going around the insane pricing, but at this point, we weren’t expecting anything less.

For desks, there’s the $5,999 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, which packs 128GB of memory into a chassis that reminds me of Apple’s cheese grater Mac Pro.

In my opinion, the biggest winners here are Windows developers who no longer need a MacBook Pro to run large AI models locally.

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