Chips & SupplyUnited States

Microsoft releases new Nvidia-chip AI PCs with revamped Windows 11

Credited to TechCrunch · techcrunch.com23h ago

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Back in June, Nvidia announced that it had secured agreements with Microsoft and a host of other PC makers to develop AI- and agent-ready PCs for Windows based on its RTX Spark chip, but details on the machines were scant at the time.

On Wednesday, at an event held in San Francisco during the city’s Tech Week, Microsoft revealed the specs and price for its new Surface Laptop Ultra. The PC comes in two base models, one that starts at $2,600 and one with a more powerful chip that starts at $3,700. Prices rise from there with options for more memory and storage, up to $5,900. (Microsoft says the highest-end device is already out of stock.)

Microsoft also revealed its new workstation powered by the RTX Spark chip: the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, which starts priced at $6,000 and comes equipped with Microsoft dev tools like VS Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, WSL, and PowerShell 7.

The pitch for both this PC and workstation is that they are designed to run AI models on-device locally (and for free) with the CPU, GPU, unified memory, and other hardware modifications, like superior cooling, necessary to handle them.

Plus, they are running a revamped version of Windows 11 that includes a feature called “Execution Containers.” This makes it easier to sandbox AI agents, the company says. That feature will be available for all Windows 11 users, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at the event.

Nadella explained: “One of the things we realized in the last 3-4 years is that just having a model doesn’t do much for anything. You really do need to orchestrate, and you need to have memory outside of the model. You need to have this harnessed layer that is able to take multiple models plus context, plus memory, and the action space.”

He added that Microsoft is enabling that “not just for our apps but apps for anyone’s agent. That’s what the Windows platform is all about going forward.”

The devices are clearly aimed at developers, so much so that Microsoft is offering up to $1,000 off to people who trade in a MacBook Pro, as Macs have become a popular choice for developers and AI agent enthusiasts, particularly in Silicon Valley.

Still, these Surface PCs, with such powerful graphics processing, are also capable of content creation, video processing, and gaming, the company promises.

Microsoft wasn’t the only PC company to announce the specs for its new Nvidia-RTX Spark AI Windows PCs on Wednesday. Dell also announced the details of its previously announced Dell XPS 16 Creator Edition PC. It’s available for preorder now for a later October delivery at Best Buy, priced at $3,800.

Original · TechCrunch

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Microsoft revealed the specs and price for its Surface Laptop Ultra, AI PCs that run on Nvidia chips that are designed to run AI models and agents.

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Chips & Supply · United States

CIQ’s Fuzzball 4.3 Runs Validated Open-Weight Models on a Customer’s GPUs with One Command

Credited to HPCwire · hpcwire.com · 18m ago

Open models deploy from a catalog with validated presets, and in-cluster agents discover them automatically, across heterogeneous GPU fleets on premises and in major clouds.

RENO, Nev., Oct. 8, 2026 — CIQ, the enterprise software company behind Rocky Linux, today announced the general availability of Fuzzball 4.3, which brings ready-to-run AI models and agents to its sovereign AI orchestration platform. The release helps enterprises operationalize open-weight models and agentic AI on infrastructure they already run, with the control and governance required for AI in production. Fuzzball 4.3 deploys validated models from a catalog, connects agents to them automatically, and scales inference across heterogeneous GPU fleets, on premises and in the cloud.

Enterprises are shifting from AI pilots to production inference and repatriating workloads to private infrastructure for cost savings, security, and sovereignty. Meeting these goals often means standing up a new infrastructure stack before the first model serves a token, then integrating models, gateways, and agents by hand. Fuzzball 4.3 gives teams a faster path to productivity without rearchitecting their environment.

“Enterprises have already made their infrastructure decisions, and private AI should fit into them. With Fuzzball 4.3, a team starts a model, starts an agent, and the two find each other, on the GPUs, clusters, and clouds the organization already runs. That is what turnkey should mean,” said Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ and founder of Rocky Linux.

Models start with one command from the self-service model catalog. Eleven presets cover open-weight models from the GPT-OSS, Llama 4, Gemma 4, Qwen3-Coder, Mistral, and Nemotron 3 families, and a vLLM-based inference entry serves any other compatible Hugging Face model.

Models autoscale behind a single, stable endpoint and can scale down to zero running instances when idle, returning GPU capacity to other workloads, ready to spin back up for additional requests. And large models can scale across multiple nodes for additional resources.

Fuzzball 4.3 connects agents to models automatically. OpenCode and hermes-agent, two coding agents in the workflow catalog, run inside the cluster and discover running models through gateways, with no manual integration. Each model ships behind a built-in LiteLLM gateway with an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Or, run one central gateway that fronts every model a user is authorized to reach. Another entry in the catalog provides a retrieval service to connect your private agents to enterprise documents.

Governance is built into the platform. Idle pools wake only for authenticated requests. Administrators control which organizations and groups can use which resources, and every workload runs unprivileged and rootless. Fuzzball 4.3 supports heterogeneous GPU fleets across NVIDIA and AMD for serving and health-aware scheduling, all under one operating model.

Fuzzball 4.3 is generally available now. Fuzzball deploys to AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, CoreWeave, and Azure, as well as on-premises clusters built with Warewulf, VMware, or bare metal. To get started, contact CIQ at ciq.com/products/fuzzball.

CIQ is the founding support and services partner for Rocky Linux and a leading provider of Enterprise Linux infrastructure. CIQ delivers secure, performant software infrastructure for the full range of modern workloads. Global enterprises, government agencies, research institutions and supercomputing centers trust CIQ to run their most advanced workloads in production, from mission-critical environments to the systems behind major scientific and AI breakthroughs. CIQ’s products include the Rocky Linux from CIQ (RLC Pro) family of operating systems, Ascender Pro for IT automation, Fuzzball job-based container orchestration, Warewulf Pro cluster provisioning, and Apptainer, the container system built for high-performance computing, with Apptainer Pro coming soon. Learn more at ciq.com.