Welcome to Staten News, where the chip company worth almost $6 trillion wants a spot in your backpack, and a French electrical company just paid $22.6 billion for a Boston software shop.
At 1 p.m. ET today in San Francisco, Satya Nadella, Windows and Surface chief Pavan Davuluri, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang share one stage. Microsoft's own billing for the event: Windows, RTX Spark, Surface, and OEM PCs.
Look at that guest list again. Jensen Huang does not fly in for a Windows patch.
💻 What RTX Spark Actually Is
RTX Spark is Nvidia's system-on-a-chip for PCs: an Arm-based CPU, a Blackwell RTX GPU, and unified memory in one package. Microsoft first put it inside the Surface Laptop Ultra, announced at the end of May.
The official specs are absurd for a laptop. Up to 128GB of unified memory. Full CUDA support. A 15-inch mini-LED screen that hits 2,000 nits. And 1 petaflop of AI compute, which Microsoft says is enough to run models up to 120 billion parameters locally. No cloud. No usage meter ticking in the background.
What Microsoft still hasn't given us is a price. The May announcement only promised "later this year," and today is the obvious place to fill in that blank, along with RTX Spark machines from other PC makers. Don't hold your breath for Windows 12. The Verge's Tom Warren already said he isn't expecting one.
♟️ Who Should Be Nervous
Qualcomm, first. Snapdragon was the face of Windows on Arm when Microsoft launched Copilot+ PCs in May 2024. Two years later, the most expensive Arm Windows laptop Microsoft makes runs on Nvidia silicon instead.
Apple, second. The MacBook Pro's pitch to AI developers has been unified memory, one big pool the GPU can tap for large models. RTX Spark is that same pitch with CUDA bolted on, and CUDA is what most AI code already runs on.
That's not a laptop launch. That's Nvidia planting a flag on the one piece of computing it didn't already own.
The catch is price. 128GB of memory in the middle of a memory crunch is not going to be cheap, and the pitch only works if developers think this beats a Mac Studio or a few hours of rented cloud GPUs. Today should tell us which side of that line Microsoft landed on.
🏭 Schneider Just Bought the Software That Designs Your Car
On Monday, Schneider Electric agreed to buy PTC in an all-cash deal valued at $22.6 billion. PTC shares jumped 33.5% to close at $192.26. It's the biggest acquisition Schneider has ever made.
If you don't know PTC, the engineers at car, aerospace, and medical device companies do. It makes computer-aided design tools plus software that tracks a product from the factory floor all the way to disposal. PTC did $2.7 billion in revenue last fiscal year.
Schneider is the company that sells the power and cooling gear inside AI data centers. It already bought out British industrial software maker Aveva in 2023. Now it owns the tools that design the things factories build. "Schneider bringing all of this together is really creating quite a large entity around industrial data management," analyst Joe Vruwink told the Boston Globe.
Translation: the AI money isn't just going to chips anymore. It's going to whoever owns the data on the factory floor.
⚡ One Post, Nine Percent
Cerebras (CBRS) rose about 9% Monday after Sam Altman posted that the chipmaker is a "close partner" and that the two companies have "a deep engagement pushing on the frontiers of speed." He was answering speculation about the relationship.
No new order. No new terms. The existing deal is the $10 billion contract OpenAI signed in January for 750 megawatts of Cerebras compute through 2028.
When one customer is that big a share of your story, a single post from its CEO is worth 9%. So is the absence of one.
📅 What's Next
Today, 1 p.m. ET: Microsoft Windows and Surface event in San Francisco, with Jensen Huang
Tuesday, Oct. 13 (reported by Bloomberg, not confirmed by Apple): Apple smart home announcements, with a home hub, a new Apple TV 4K, and a second-gen HomePod mini expected
This is the day Nvidia finds out whether it can sell a laptop the way it sells a data center. The answer starts at 1 p.m.
Sources: Windows Experience Blog: Introducing Surface Laptop Ultra, TechEngage event preview, Boston Globe on Schneider and PTC, Yahoo Finance on Cerebras
— The Bandicoots 💻⚡