Nvidia opened Computex in Taipei on Sunday by unveiling the RTX Spark, a 1-petaflop CPU it is calling a 'superchip,' and naming eight PC makers that will ship Windows laptops built around it this fall. ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft Surface and MSI are first out the door, with Acer and Gigabyte to follow. The pitch is that RTX Spark machines will run AI agents locally — Nvidia name-checked OpenClaw and Hermes Agent — inside secure sandboxes co-developed with Microsoft.
The chip is the consumer-facing edge of a much larger Nvidia bet. On its May earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang told investors that CPUs for AI represent a $200 billion market opportunity, separate from the GPU business that has driven the company's record quarters. Huang pointed to the Vera server CPU released earlier this year, of which Nvidia says it has already sold $20 billion worth, as the first proof point.
Nvidia is marketing RTX Spark PCs as a single device that can run frontier models locally, handle creator workflows in Adobe, Blender and ComfyUI, and deliver RTX gaming across more than 1,000 supported titles and applications. More than 100 Windows software makers have signed on, including Riot Games and Xbox. The company is framing the machines as an upgrade path for both gamers and AI builders who today rent cloud GPU time.
Key facts
- 01Nvidia unveiled the RTX Spark, a 1-petaflop CPU it calls a 'superchip,' at Computex on Sunday.
- 02ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft Surface and MSI will ship RTX Spark Windows PCs in fall 2026, with Acer and Gigabyte to follow.
- 03Jensen Huang told investors in May that CPUs for AI represent a $200 billion market for Nvidia.
- 04Nvidia has already sold $20 billion of its Vera server CPU released earlier this year.
- 05More than 100 Windows software makers, including Adobe, Blender, ComfyUI, Riot Games and Xbox, have signed on to support the chip.
Microsoft is positioning its own RTX Spark device as the Surface Laptop Ultra, which it calls 'the most powerful Surface Laptop ever built.' That is a notable rebrand: the last time Microsoft and Nvidia shipped an ARM-based Windows PC together, in 2013, the Surface RT ended with a $900 million writedown and Dell among the partners walking away. The new Surface is being positioned at the opposite end of the spectrum — more compute, not less.
Specifics that buyers usually want at launch are still missing. None of the eight PC makers have published pricing for their RTX Spark systems, and configuration details are thin. The most useful comparable is Nvidia's own DGX Spark mini-computer, sold to developers for about $4,800; the Windows PCs appear to be full-fledged consumer variants of that design.
Huang's framing on the May earnings call was that PCs are the device layer for an agent economy, not just a gaming category. He argued the agent buildout will require far more CPUs than today's human-driven computing, with each agent using tools the way a person uses a laptop.
Pricing will decide how this lands. At the high end, RTX Spark machines plausibly sit alongside Nvidia's own developer mini-PC near $4,800, which makes them a workstation purchase rather than a consumer one. At a more aggressive price they would run directly into the affordable Mac Mini, which has become a popular local-inference box for exactly the OpenClaw-style workloads Nvidia is targeting. None of the PC makers have signaled which side of that line they intend to sit on.
The 1-petaflop figure is the headline differentiator. If Nvidia and Microsoft can in fact deliver agentic workflows that run locally, securely, and without a round trip to a cloud GPU, the RTX Spark category answers a question OEMs have been asking for two years: what is the actual reason to buy a new Windows laptop in the agent era. The Surface Laptop Ultra branding suggests Microsoft thinks the answer is a premium tier rather than a volume play.
Skeptics will note that Nvidia has been here before, that ARM-on-Windows has historically struggled with application compatibility, and that the 100-developer commitment list, while real, is dwarfed by the broader Windows ecosystem. The 2013 Surface RT writedown is not a perfect comparison — Vera and RTX Spark are far more capable silicon — but it is the cautionary tale every PC OEM in this lineup will have studied.
The strategic read is that Nvidia is using the RTX Spark launch to extend a GPU-era moat into the CPU market before AMD and Intel can box it out of agentic PCs. Nvidia's RTX Spark laptops, which AI Chat Daily covered last week as an Apple M1-style moment, now have a full OEM lineup, a Microsoft halo product, and a stated $200 billion addressable market behind them. The unknown is whether the fall 2026 pricing will treat the agent PC as a category for everyone or as a premium SKU that only a slice of the market can buy.
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