Nvidia is set to bring artificial intelligence to laptop and desktop computers with brands like Microsoft and Dell later this year as the US tech giant broadens its AI presence.

The Santa Clara, California-based AI chipmaker unveiled on Monday at its annual Nvidia GTC event in Taipei new powerful chips that would bring advanced AI functions to laptops and desktop computers.

CEO Jensen Huang said that the new development is “going to reinvent the PC [personal computer]”.

The changes come amid three years of collaboration between Microsoft and Nvidia and pit the latter against companies like chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices and personal computer brands Intel and Apple.

“This is going to be the new PC,” Huang said as he unveiled Nvidia’s RTX Spark superchip — which combines CPU, or central processing unit, and GPU, or graphics processing unit, capabilities — that would power new Windows laptop and desktop computer models in what the company called “AI personal computers”, expected to debut in the fall of this year.

The chip, developed with Taiwan’s MediaTek, will be in compact desktops from Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS, Microsoft Surface and MSI, with models from Acer and GIGABYTE to follow.

Nvidia, which is already the world’s most valuable company, said the reinvention will be for creating and gaming.

“When it has an autonomous [AI] agent, an agent that’s helping you, that understands you, you could talk to it. It could look at you. You could ask it to read files, go help you do some research. It could do a lot more,” Huang said.

Microsoft said in a separate statement that the personal computers running on Nvidia’s RTX Spark superchips would be able to support “highly capable AI models” and complex workloads. With the new superchips, these personal computers can run AI agents locally, Nvidia said.

“This is the first across the lineup of PC reinvention for 40 years,” Huang said.

Nvidia’s move is significant at a time when demand is growing for the use of personal AI agents, said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at the technology research and advisory group Omdia.

“For consumers, it means more choices, which is always a good thing,” Su said.

Neil Shah, analyst and co-founder of Counterpoint Research, a tech industry market research firm, described Nvidia’s announcement as a move that’s “revolutionising how PCs would look like in the next 10 years”.

The new laptops and desktop computers “will drive agentic AI applications in every home”, Shah said, with an aim of having an “AI supercomputer” in each household.

Also during Monday’s speech, Nvidia’s Huang said its new Vera CPUs for data centres are in full production and are “going to be our new major growth driver” on the boom of AI agents, with early customers including Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceXAI.

Huang also revealed a humanoid robot reference design that could act as a blueprint for future research, especially within the higher education sector. Nvidia said its “Isaac GR00T” stands nearly 1.83 metres (6 feet) tall and has the humanoid chassis of Chinese robot maker Unitree’s H2. It is equipped with five-fingered dexterous hands, made by Singapore-based robotics startup Sharpa, that are capable of finely controlled movements.

Reception for AI PCs has been mixed so far. HP reported last week that the devices helped prop up quarterly sales, but Dell said earlier this year that demand had fallen short of initial expectations. Qualcomm, looking to capitalise on AI demand, has also been offering AI PCs with Microsoft.

Privacy concerns

Microsoft’s involvement has raised concerns about privacy and consumer demand. Microsoft first introduced a digital assistant called Cortana in 2014, but it failed to gain traction.

Cortana’s reputation was also riddled with privacy concerns.

In 2019, tech publication Motherboard reported that Microsoft hired contractors to listen to consumer data from both Xbox and Skype integrations. The product was ultimately retired in 2023 and replaced with Copilot, an AI agent that has failed to gain consumer traction. In March, the company reported its worst quarter since the 2008 financial crisis.

“NVIDIA and Microsoft hope that AI agents and advanced models will resonate with users when compared to Cortana. The hardware is ready, but the big question is whether Windows users will want another Microsoft assistant,” David Naranjo, an associate director at Counterpoint Research, told Al Jazeera.

The privacy concerns, however, could be different due to the nature of the product, as the agents will run directly on devices.

“One of the things that happens when you want to do an AI environment is you have to ring-fence what information you want it to access. You have to be very careful about letting it access everything, whereas Microsoft just said, ‘OK, we’re going to put it into a Microsoft environment, let it access everything that’s on your computer, and give it untethered access,” Scott Stevens, founder and CEO of the investment firm Grays Peak Capital, told Al Jazeera.

“Typically, that’s not a great way to do it. That’s why you create either these agents or these models to make sure they’re only doing specific tasks, whereas with Copilot and Microsoft, you had to let it gain access to everything to use it, which is one of the things people are getting less comfortable with. Give it your operating system, give it all the programmes that you’re running.”

On Wall Street, Nvidia stock is up 6 percent in midday trading on the heels of the announcement. Microsoft rose by 2.2 percent and Dell jumped 10 percent. Competitors AMD and Intel, on other hand, fell on the news. AMD fell by 0.5 percent, and Intel tumbled by 4.5 percent.