Microsoft Build 2026: All the news about Windows, AI, RTX Spark, and more

Just in case you were wondering, Nvidia’s RTX Spark isn’t supposed to be a one-off. The company is not just flirting with becoming the fifth high-profile vendor of consumer laptop chips to see if people bite. At Computex 2026 in Taipei, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirmed at least two additional generations of RTX Spark are already planned. The eventual goal, he said, is to build Star Trek-like computers and and Star Wars-like droids you can order around with your voice.

“I want to talk to my laptop! I want R2-D2!” he told analysts and investors at Computex, revealing that he started working with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella “about three years ago” to build towards that goal.

At Microsoft’s annual Build conference on Tuesday, the company announced a slew of new or expanded AI initiatives, including a super app, in-house reasoning models, a cybersecurity tool, and OpenClaw-esque AI agents. All this news added up to a clear message: Microsoft is positioned to be one of the biggest players in AI, and it’s finally acting like it.

For years, Microsoft’s AI business leaned hard on its early and exclusive partnership with OpenAI. But the drama-filled marriage slowly devolved into a situationship, and the pair effectively separated in late April (though Microsoft is still OpenAI’s primary cloud partner — for now). This year’s Build had the vibe of a freshly single divorcée posting a thirst trap on Instagram. “It’s always fun to be at developer conferences in times of great change,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said onstage Tuesday, adding that events like this are about “coming to grips with the new opportunity.”

Microsoft has two new Surface devices arriving later this year, both powered by Nvidia’s RTX Spark chips. I got a chance to take a closer look at both the Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface RTX Spark Dev Box at Microsoft’s Build conference this week, and while both have the same chip inside, they’re utilizing Nvidia’s RTX Spark in different ways.

The Surface Laptop Ultra looks and feels very much like a 16-inch MacBook Pro. There are no transforming hinges, detachable displays, or any other tricks — this is a clamshell laptop built with performance in mind. Microsoft has opted for a 15-inch mini LED panel, which operates at up to 2,000 nits of HDR brightness. I got to see that peak HDR level in a dark room, and I can confirm it’s a very, very bright display. In fact, it’s the brightest display Microsoft has ever put on a Surface device.

Microsoft just kicked off Build 2026 with a keynote from CEO Satya Nadella and other company leaders. As expected, it was filled with announcements, ranging from new Surface hardware to an always-on personal assistant and updates across Microsoft’s in-house AI models.

If you didn’t watch the event live, you can catch up on all the latest news in the roundup below.

Microsoft claimed last year that it had made a key breakthrough in quantum computing with Majorana 1, the company’s first quantum processor. While physicists were immediately skeptical of Microsoft’s claims, the software giant is announcing Majorana 2 today, the next generation of its topological quantum chip.

Majorana 2 contains qubits, a unit of information in quantum computing much like the binary bits that computers use today, that are 1,000 times more reliable, according to Microsoft. It’s a milestone that helps make quantum computing more reliable, thanks to the use of a new material stack and some help from Microsoft Discovery’s agentic AI.

Microsoft announced a bunch of new in-house AI models at Build 2026, including a new “flagship” model: MAI-Thinking-1. It’s an ambitious step into model development for Microsoft, which introduced its initial in-house models last year — before then, it had relied on OpenAI’s models. The two companies recently renegotiated their deal to loosen ties.

According to Microsoft, MAI-Thinking-1 is a “medium-sized model” that “matches leading models” on “key” software engineering benchmarks. Microsoft says the company “trained it from the ground up on clean data, without distillation from third-party models.”

Much like Google, Microsoft is launching its own version of OpenClaw. Microsoft Scout is an always-on assistant that integrates into Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams, allowing businesses to assign a virtual assistant to employees to help with organizing calendars, expense reporting, email drafts, and much more.

Unlike Copilot that lives inside Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft Scout can see and do a lot more. “This is a personal assistant, it’s the first real personal assistant we’ve offered customers,” explains Omar Shahine, corporate vice president of Microsoft Scout, in an interview with The Verge. “I think it’s important for customers to understand that you’re going to get a phone call from this assistant, it’s a very different type of AI than chat.”

Microsoft just announced “Project Solara,” a new OS designed for gadgets that run AI agents, at Build 2026. The company is calling it “a new platform built from the ground up to power agent-driven experiences.” It’s built on Android, not Windows.

Microsoft demonstrated two concept Project Solara devices at Build today: Desk concept and badge concept. The desk concept is an Amazon Echo Show-like device that unlocks with facial recognition and provides access to AI agents.

Microsoft is kicking off its Build developer conference today with a promise of making Windows a trusted platform for development. As the company continues to focus on performance and reliability fixes for Windows 11, it’s also creating a developer-optimized experience that bundles a lot of useful tools and apps and embraces Linux even further.

“We have optimized the Windows 11 experience for developers, bringing frequently used command line utilities, a familiar comfort shell, faster setup experience, a built-in way to create and interact with Linux containers on Windows and a new experimental Intelligent Terminal,” explains Windows chief Pavan Davuluri.

Microsoft only just announced a new Surface Laptop Ultra at the weekend, and it’s now revealing a miniature Surface PC aimed at developers. The new Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is powered by Nvidia’s new Arm-based RTX Spark chips, just like the Surface Laptop Ultra, and is optimized for sustained workloads and local AI tasks.

The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box looks a little like the top of an Xbox Series X console, with an aluminum chassis that also doubles as a heatsink. It has a 100-watt thermal envelope, slightly more than the 45-watt-to-80-watt thermal envelopes for Nvidia’s RTX Spark laptops. This miniature Surface PC also has 128GB of unified memory, making it capable of running up to 120 billion parameter models locally.

Microsoft is kicking off its yearly Build developer conference in San Francisco today, sandwiched between the recent Google I/O and Apple’s upcoming WWDC event. While tickets to attend Build in person are sold out, the conference is being streamed for free online, with CEO Satya Nadella opening with a keynote at 12:30PM ET / 9:30AM PT.

A cursory glance at the featured speakers and virtual sessions suggests that Build will predominantly focus on AI, which isn’t surprising given this is a developer event in 2026. The keynote description also says that Nadella and Microsoft leaders will be sharing “how Microsoft is creating new opportunity for developers across our platforms in this era of AI,” though specific details about the announcements have yet to emerge.

Microsoft is heading to San Francisco this week in a bid to win back developers at its Build conference. I’ve been attending Build since the days when Microsoft called it the Professional Developers Conference, and I can’t remember a more pivotal moment. As Microsoft continues to reshuffle its entire business around AI, it’s moving Build into a smaller, more intimate venue. Trust in Windows and GitHub is at an all-time low, and this is Microsoft’s chance to reconnect with developers and outline the future.

Sources tell me that we’ll hear about new AI models in Windows, a new reasoning model from Microsoft AI, and a Copilot “super app.” But perhaps more importantly for Build attendees, I understand that Microsoft will be revealing more about its work on improving the experience of Windows for developers. I’m told that Microsoft will unveil a new Windows 11 developer optimized experience this week, which includes many of the things that developers have been asking for in Windows: a distraction-free environment with preinstalled apps, tools, and scripts.

Microsoft is moving its annual Build developer conference from Seattle back to San Francisco and making some changes along the way. This year, the event will be held at Fort Mason, the former US Army post located in the San Francisco Bay Area, instead of the bustling downtown of Seattle. Microsoft is moving Build to this location to capture the AI buzz of San Francisco and to make the event more intimate.

“There are great conferences that are enormous, and part of it is just the sprawl and scale of it, and there are great conferences that are tiny that are really a personalized experience,” says Kyle Daigle, chief operating officer at GitHub, in an interview with The Verge. “I think we’re trying to fit in the middle of it where meeting with people that attend is just as much a part of the actual conference content, announcements, and using the tech.”