Nvidia became a household name after the AI boom, with its graphics cards (GPUs) in high demand to run memory-hungry data centres seeing the firm’s market value skyrocket. Before that, Nvidia played mostly in the computer games market, selling graphics cards directly to consumers who wanted to build their own custom gaming PCs.

Now, the firm is pushing back into the PC industry with RTX Spark, Nvidia’s first ever chip designed for consumer laptops. It’s been greeted as a big deal because the Spark is based on Arm technology rather than that of competitors Qualcomm or Intel, two firms whose chips currently run most of the world’s Windows 11 laptops alongside AMD.

In fact, Qualcomm’s mobile chip rival MediaTek helped Nvidia create the RTX Spark. It has 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU cores and 128GB RAM. That is a maxed out laptop chip, though Nvidia did not share performance or benchmark stats at the Spark’s announcement at Computex, the PC trade show in Taipei.

PC chip makers have been playing catch-up with Apple ever since the first Apple-built M chip – also based on Arm – in 2020. Apple proved laptops could have genuinely all-day battery life and great performance, and now Nvidia is hoping to prove it can match Apple, announcing the RTX Spark will feature in new computers from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, MSI, Acer and GIGABYTE.

“Designed for AI, creating and gaming, RTX Spark brings together 30 years of NVIDIA innovation … to slim Windows laptops with all-day battery life and small, ultraefficient desktop PCs,” Nvidia said.

The flagship laptop announced with the Spark is the Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra, which shows Microsoft and Nvidia uniting to take on the MacBook Pro at the high-end of the laptop market – though no Spark-equipped machines have had pricing confirmed yet.

Given that Nvidia’s fortunes have exploded thanks to the AI boom, you should not be surprised that the RTX Spark is centred around artificial intelligence. More than Apple, Microsoft has leant hard into AI with its Copilot brand and software that is now on every Windows 11 laptop – new laptops are even required to have a dedicated Copilot button on their keyboards.

Nvidia is promising Spark will make Windows laptops better integrated with the AI tools people interact and use.

“The PC is being reinvented,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “For forty years, you launched apps. Click. Type. With RTX Spark and Microsoft Windows, you ask — and the PC does the work. RTX Spark brings everything NVIDIA has built — CUDA, RTX, our AI platform — into a single superchip. Local agents. Frontier models. Creative workflows. RTX games. All on a laptop. This is the new PC. The personal AI computer.”

The first laptops are expected later in the autumn with six premium devices from Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI and Microsoft, though the range will grow to about 30 laptops and 10 mini desktop machines.

As well as the Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra, Dell announced the new XPS 16, while Asus introduced the ProArt P16 and P14.

It’ll be interesting to see the pricing on these computers. Apple sells the MacBook Air for £1,099, which is currently the cheapest laptop with an M-series chip, even though the chips are available for £599 on the iPad Air.