Microsoft opens $5,999 preorders for the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a desktop for running large models locally
The Dev Box is built on Nvidia's RTX Spark superchip, which pairs a Blackwell GPU with a 20-core Grace CPU and 128GB of unified memory. Reported AI performance is about one petaflop, enough to run models above 100B parameters without the cloud. Under Microsoft's Project Zenith program it comes with WSL, VS Code, Git, GitHub Copilot, Python and Node preinstalled. Monitor and keyboard are sold separately. Microsoft first showed the machine at Build on June 2. The Surface Laptop Ultra, which uses the same chip, opened for preorder alongside it at $2,599 and becomes available October 16. Asus, Dell, Lenovo, HP and MSI also have RTX Spark PCs. For AI teams, this gives a Windows-native option for local inference and fine-tuning, alongside Nvidia's own DGX Spark and Apple's high-memory Macs. Local development boxes make it easier to iterate on private data and cut per-token cost for evals and small agent workloads.
