Microsoft opened Copilot AI preorders for the Surface Laptop Ultra on Oct 7, 2026. The 15-inch flagship starts at $2,599.99 and uses NVIDIA’s RTX Spark instead of Intel. Buyers looking at Microsoft’s top Surface machine now face a cleaner split: this model is built around Arm-based silicon, while the company’s Intel-era premium path is no longer the flagship.
Satya Nadella and RTX Spark
Satya Nadella said, “We needed to make the desktop the most secure place for agents to execute.” That line ties the machine to Copilot AI use rather than to raw specs alone, and it explains why Microsoft is leaning on a new chip layout for its highest-end laptop.
The Surface Laptop Ultra pairs RTX Spark with up to a 20-core NVIDIA Grace CPU and up to 128 GB of unified memory. That is the configuration Microsoft is asking buyers to pay for when they reach the $5,899.99 top model, while shipments begin on Oct 16, 2026.
Microsoft and Intel
This is Microsoft’s first flagship Surface model to exclude Intel. Microsoft still sells Intel-based business Surface machines, but the company moved its mainstream consumer Surface Laptops to Qualcomm Snapdragon chips in 2024 and discontinued its previous performance laptop in May 2025.
That makes the Surface Laptop Ultra a sharper strategic break than a routine refresh. Intel supplied about 70% of PC processors in the second quarter of 2026, so the company remains dominant in the market even as it loses the top slot inside Microsoft’s most expensive laptop.
NVIDIA RTX Spark on Windows PCs
NVIDIA unveiled RTX Spark between May 31 and June 1, 2026, and Jensen Huang said it had “reinvented the personal computer completely.” The chip is an Arm-based part co-designed by NVIDIA and MediaTek, and NVIDIA has called it its first CPU for mainstream Windows PCs.
Acer, ASUS, Lenovo, MSI, and Gigabyte are building RTX Spark machines, which puts Microsoft in a wider hardware wave rather than in a lone experiment. The open question is how much better the Surface Laptop Ultra will perform than Microsoft’s earlier Surface performance laptop and Qualcomm-based consumer models, since Microsoft has not put that comparison in the preorder details.
