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Running local AI models on Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra: What we found

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Running local AI models on Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra: What we found

Microsoft is positioning the new Surface Laptop Ultra as an alternative to Apple’s MacBook Pros for creatives and developers — and especially AI developers.

Built on Nvidia’s N1X-based RTX Spark platform, with a Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 6,144 cores, a CPU with up to 20 cores, up to 128GB of unified memory, and a price that undercuts Apple, it’s a tempting alternative if you want to run local AI models and also want to have a powerful machine for editing videos and gaming on the go.

This is The New Stack, so I’m leaving the gaming benchmarks and creator use cases to others. My focus in testing the unit was on running AI workloads.

I’ve been using the Surface Laptop Ultra in its high-end $4,300 GPU and CPU configuration with 64GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD for the last week, including while on the road.

Typically, I use a Mac Studio with the M4 Max chip at home, which happily runs most local models I throw at it (as long as they fit into the 48 GB of RAM). I installed all the usual tools I use to run local models on the laptop. Think Unsloth Studio, Ollama, Hermes Agent, etc.

At no point did I feel like I was making a compromise in running those on the laptop. Indeed, if anything, the Blackwell GPU was generally a bit faster than my Mac Studio.

5 Bolt model launched earlier this week, I also took that one for a spin.


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