Microsoft makes MXC agent containers generally available on Windows as NVIDIA opens RTX Spark laptop preorders with 1 petaflop of FP4 and up to 128GB of unified memory
At Microsoft’s Windows AI and Surface event, the two companies pushed always-on local agents forward at both the OS and hardware layers.
// Key points
- Microsoft announced general availability of Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), OS-level infrastructure that lets agents run safely and persistently in the background under operating system control.
- RTX Spark pairs a Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 6,144 cores and an up to 20-core Grace CPU connected at 600 GB/s, for 1 petaflop of FP4 compute and up to 128GB of unified memory; laptop preorders open now with availability on October 16, and compact desktops go on sale in November.
- NVIDIA says it can run the 125B-parameter Qwen 3.8 Flash Next locally, unmetered and without sending data to the cloud; systems are coming from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, MSI and Gigabyte.
- NVIDIA also previewed DGX Station for Windows: a GB300 superchip with 748GB of coherent memory and up to 20 petaFLOPS of FP4, which it says can run models up to trillion-parameter scale locally.
Builder's takeThis is the same MXC that powers Copilot's local sandboxing above, so the isolation layer for running agents on your own machine now ships with the OS. With 128GB of unified memory holding a 100B-plus model, keeping private data on the device can be validated on a single machine, and products handling private files like my AI Cloud Drive could consider a local-inference edition. Don't rush the hardware purchase, though: first check whether a local model is good enough for your workload.