This is the AI Surface Dave Box for those who don’t want a laptop.
In addition to the Surface Laptop Ultra, Microsoft has another device coming that’s powered by NVIDIA’s RTX Spark chip: the creatively named Surface RTX Spark Dev Box. Announced at Build today, it’s basically a desktop version of Laptop Ultimate built for continuous AI tasks like “long-running training tasks, agentive AI pipelines, and local model fine-tuning,” according to Microsoft. Naturally, the Dave Box can handle more heat too, thanks to its 100W thermal envelope (and lower power Arm CPU).
Again, like the Surface Laptop Ultra, there aren’t too many surprises with the Dave box either. Thanks to the RTX Spark chip, it can have up to 128GB of integrated memory and offers petaflops worth of AI computing power. It will also have NVIDIA’s RTX Blackwell GPU embedded in it, giving it similar gaming performance to the laptop version of the RTX 5070.
You can think of the RTX Spark Dev Box as Microsoft’s answer to AMD’s Ryzen AI Halo PC and NVIDIA’s DGX Spark Mini PC, both of which cost $3,999. After all, despite their gaming capabilities, these are systems for developers.
Microsoft hasn’t listed a price for the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box yet, but it says it will arrive via Microsoft.com later this year. Don’t expect to go to Best Buy to get this thing.
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