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Live from San Francisco, we compiled all the biggest news from Microsoft's annual developer conference. This is how Microsoft sees the future of AI computing.

Corinne Reichert

Jon Reed

Patrick Holland

Katelyn Chedraoui

June 4, 2026 9:45 a.m. PT

June 4, 2026 at 5:26 PM PDT

The rapid buildout of data centers across the US to meet the growing demand for AI tools has become a controversial topic, with state laws popping up to limit their construction and critics weighing in to stop them. While CEO Satya Nadella went on stage to emphasize Microsoft's more community-driven approach to building data centers, CNET senior writer Corinne Reichert spoke with protestors staking out the Microsoft Build software conference to expand on community concerns.

June 3, 2026 at 4:05 PM PDT

With Microsoft Build 2026 coming to a close on Wednesday afternoon, that's a wrap on all the major announcements, demonstrations and displays from the company's annual developer conference.

From the flurry of AI updates to live demos of the AI capabilities of its new laptop, Microsoft was able to show what its new advancements can actually do for developers, AI agents, scientists, businesses, consumers and more. Plus, with surprise appearances by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (via video link, at least), OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger and, for some reason, The Chainsmokers, the lengthy keynote remained interesting for its 2.5-hour run.

Some of the bigger revelations were Project Solara and its AI agent-first device prototypes, a new image-generating AI tool that competes with Google's Nano Banana Pro, Microsoft's first reasoning model, a new quantum computing chip and Bing for bots.

As for what it was like on the ground for the past two days, Microsoft filled multiple buildings with colorful displays, tech showcases, stages, live podcasts, T-shirt screen printing, a gaming lounge, an AI image generator where you could create and print images, prize machines to win Clippy pins and Build Quest to complete challenges and earn points -- and even a whole Mercedes AMG Formula 1 car was on display.

Fort Mason Center, which was once a military base and juts out onto the bay, has views of the looming Alcatraz and the shrouded-in-fog Golden Gate Bridge. Microsoft made it a vibrant space for the 2,500 people at Build this year.

The only fly in the ointment was an anti-AI data center protest at the entrance to Microsoft Build, although Nadella said during a live podcast earlier on Tuesday that "it's good for communities to be skeptical" and ask questions about whether a new data center will benefit their community.

CNET Social Media Manager Faith Chihil, who accompanied me to Build and was also present during Google I/O last month, said the Microsoft conference had better food, both in terms of variety and availability.

"I would say one thing compared to I/O I felt was the announcements at Build seemed more grounded in reality, use cases that seemed in touch with more common developer issues and activities," Chihil added. "Fewer references to planning block parties and buying concert tickets and more about synthesizing meetings and getting workloads done."

June 3, 2026 at 3:02 PM PDT

Speaking further about Microsoft's goals for building data centers with community "permission" during a live podcast filming Tuesday afternoon at Microsoft Build, Nadella said real changes have to be felt by locals to make it work.

"It has to be real, where people are saying, 'It's not changing the prices of energy for me, in fact, if anything, it's bringing down the prices because long term there's going to be a better grid, there's going to be more energy … water is being replenished,'" the Microsoft CEO said.

He added that Microsoft is seeking to add jobs during and after the construction of these massive data centers, but he said, "It's good for communities to be skeptical, ask the hard questions."

"All this has to be real. And if that is the case, then we'll have permission," Nadella said. "If it is not, you won't have permission; it's as simple as that."

June 3, 2026 at 2:24 PM PDT

Over at the Microsoft Build Showcase at the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco, we got to tour some new technology late on Tuesday, including the just-announced Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra with Nvidia's RTX Spark in action.

During a series of live demos, Microsoft took the new laptop through its paces, including using OpenClaw to vibe code graphics-intensive artwork, Nvidia Blackwell DLSS 4.5 ray tracing and creating 3D images while gaming, all while running a very large AI model on the laptop, thanks to the 128GB of memory. There were no juddering images, and the Surface Laptop Ultra was able to perform the series of hoops it was required to jump through for the demonstrations.

Some of those demos ran entirely locally, with the Surface Laptop Ultra in airplane mode to show that it can complete your AI coding needs while keeping your data private.

The screen remained clear and legible, even under the bright lights of the demo area. The 15-inch laptop has a 262ppi mini-LED touchscreen that supports HDR, with a maximum brightness of 2,000 nits.

RTX Spark is a new Arm-based system-on-chip platform bringing Nvidia's Blackwell architecture to Windows laptops. It was unveiled by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during Computex in Taipei on Monday.

We got to see and feel the new laptop (which stayed cool to the touch in spite of the multiple intensive coding and gaming applications being run on it simultaneously) and hear about the entire physical design process, from the choice of the color -- named nightfall -- to the placement of fans for maximum cooling and the shape of the bottom of the device.

Also on display was the 3D-printed RTX Spark Dev Box, which runs on Windows 11 Pro and is small enough to sit on your desktop. It comes "preconfigured for AI development," according to Microsoft.

June 3, 2026 at 1:28 PM PDT

At the entrance to the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, where Microsoft Build 2026 is being held, a handful of AI data center protesters put up colorful signs depicting scenes of corporate greed, pollution and poverty.

The rapid construction of data centers across the US to fulfill the increasing demands of AI tools has been met with criticisms about the massive amounts of land, water and power needed to run them. 

"What we're doing on our planet and all the impacts that are happening not just here in San Francisco but across the United States -- the ripple effects of that are going to be felt," Amy Herman, one of the people handing out leaflets about Microsoft's AI data centers, told me. 

"It's not that we're against technology, or against any sort of monetization of innovation. I think it's a challenge of: We have limited resources, and we have big tech companies that are not as interested in being accountable to the stewardship of 21st-century technologies in managing climate change."

Herman said electrical prices in rural areas are far higher in communities where data centers have been built, with people forced to choose between paying for medical support or their electricity bills.

"Big Tech has a role in shaping our social and cultural agendas, and I think they need to pay their fair share," Herman said. "It's wrapped up into wider conversations about Main Street versus Wall Street, and how we're going to reshape the economy in a way that benefits everyday people."

June 3, 2026 at 9:30 AM PDT

So you're telling me you didn't spend nearly three hours watching Microsoft Build's opening keynote during the middle of the workday? Here's a quick recap of what you missed.

• Bing for bots: Microsoft is betting that AI agents (or bots) are going to be doing your internet searches for you soon. And to help make that happen, the company made Web IQ, which helps agents scour the web. Senior Editor Corinne Reichert spoke to Jordi Ribas, Microsoft's president of search and AI, about what that entails.
• Seven new AI models: You may not know that Microsoft makes its own AI models, but these next-generation tools are designed to help you with coding, image generation, transcription and speech recognition. MAI-Image-2.5 beat out reigning champ Nano Banana when it comes to image editing in one benchmark assessment.
• Chips, and not the kind you eat with dip: You need hardware to run all this AI software. Microsoft introduced the new Surface Laptop Ultra (with Nvidia's RTX Spark superchip) at Computex in Taiwan last week, but now we've seen it in action.

Keep scrolling for all the details on these announcements, and -- I kid you not -- a cameo from EDM duo The Chainsmokers.

June 2, 2026 at 3:06 PM PDT

Speaking during a breakout session at Microsoft Build 2026, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger said artificial intelligence agents are here to stay. 

Coders no longer have to figure out how to build software faster; they have to figure out how to get their agent to build software faster, he said.

"It's only been a year since we've had coding agents, half a year since they got good, and now there's no stopping them," Steinberger said.

OpenClaw and Microsoft announced during the Build keynote on Tuesday that a new system called Microsoft Execution Containers will allow you to create secure containers in which to run AI agents. That includes OpenClaw, the AI tool that allows you to run autonomous, always-on agents. 

"You can totally run OpenClaw inside your company now," Steinberger said during the keynote.

June 2, 2026 at 2:06 PM PDT

Built on Microsoft's cloud computing platform Azure, Microsoft Discovery is an agentic AI platform built for scientists and researchers. According to the tech giant, mining company BHP is already "using it to find copper-leaching solutions in months instead of years," while biopharma company GSK is using Microsoft Discovery for "drug discovery" and chemicals research company Syensqo is using it for semiconductor research and development.

During an onstage demo during the Build keynote, David Carmona, VP of Microsoft Discovery and Quantum, showed how the discovery engine can explore hypotheses and perform long-running simulations for hours or even days. When he opened a slide that was already completed earlier by Microsoft Discovery, he showed that it was based on a research paper he had asked it to use, "internally bringing together public scientific literature and internal knowledge."

"This is a critical asset because it provides complete visibility of the research, so scientists can be in full control," Carmona said.

Microsoft Discovery is available from Tuesday, and a free Discovery app will be accessible in preview form for the scientific community this summer, requiring a GitHub Copilot account.

June 2, 2026 at 2:01 PM PDT

Microsoft is getting back into the creative AI space. It just dropped two new image generation models, named MAI-Image-2.5 and a flash variant. MAI-Image-2.5 is available now in PowerPoint and Foundry, with plans to roll out to OneDrive soon.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said the new image model outperforms Google's Nano Banana, one of the most popular AI image tools available, in image editing. But it isn't the benchmark leader -- Suleyman said it placed second. It's an impressive stat, but I'm withholding any judgments until I can get my hands on the new model and see how it performs. Every AI image tool has its pros and cons, even so-called leaderboard darlings.

These are two of seven new AI models from Microsoft AI. Microsoft also introduced the next generation of its AI models for voice generation, transcription and coding. Keep scrolling to read about them.

June 2, 2026 at 1:35 PM PDT

Just two months after dropping MAI-Transcribe-1 and MAI-Voice-1, Microsoft has updated both its speech recognition and speech generation models. 

MAI-Transcribe-1.5 can transcribe 43 languages, while MAI-Voice-2 now has 15 additional languages and new voice options.

June 2, 2026 at 1:21 PM PDT

Microsoft's MAI-Code-1, an AI coding model that was tuned for GitHub, is now available on Copilot and VS Code. 

Many AI companies have been focusing on building AI tools for coding this year, like OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code. This new model gives developers even more ways to use AI in their work, if they want to.

June 2, 2026 at 1:08 PM PDT

One of the seven new Microsoft AI models launched during the Microsoft Build keynote was MAI-Thinking-1, its first reasoning model. It was trained using "clean and commercially licensed data," according to Microsoft, with high performance and low token cost. 

"We need an AI that places humanity first, prioritizes human well-being, and human progress. This is the core philosophy and motivation behind our superintelligence efforts and Microsoft," the company said during the keynote.

Available now on Foundry in a private preview, Microsoft says the model is good at complex, multistep reasoning and code generation, and compares to Claude's Sonnet 4.61 and Opus 4.6.

"It's a midsized, 35 billion active parameter model with a 128K context window," said Kyle Daigle, COO of GitHub and CMO of Microsoft Developer.

June 2, 2026 at 1:00 PM PDT

Generally available as of Tuesday across GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio, Microsoft IQ is billed as "a new context layer that grounds agents in both world knowledge and enterprise knowledge." In other words, it gives AI agents the context they need to draw from to complete tasks for you -- using both your own workplace info and the live internet.

It's got a few different components:

• Work IQ: Provides workplace context for AI agents working in organizations, including access across Microsoft 365 -- like emails, documents and meetings. This will be generally available on June 16.
• Web IQ: A search engine for AI agents.
• Fabric IQ: A shared semantic space for your data, models and systems.
• Foundry IQ: Ties together retrieval from enterprise knowledge and the live internet.

June 2, 2026 at 12:47 PM PDT

To wrap things up, Nadella announced a new quantum computing chip, Majorana 2. The hardware builds off Microsoft's topological qubit technology to create more reliable qubits -- the material that makes advanced quantum computing possible. 

Majorana 2 produces qubits with a mean lifetime of 20 seconds -- up from just 1 to 12 milliseconds in Majorana 1. Some qubits had lifetimes of more than a minute. That comes from the use of lead in the materials, compared to the aluminum-based Majorana 1.

"It's this combination of the reliability, the speed, the size which makes the topological approach so unique," Nadella said.

Nadella said the company used its Microsoft Discovery AI research platform to help make the advancements. 

The step forward is significant, but don't expect a quantum-powered laptop anytime soon. Microsoft said in a blog post that the progress cut its timeline for a scalable quantum computer in half -- to now expecting to have one in 2029.

June 2, 2026 at 12:36 PM PDT

The Copilot app for GitHub is now in preview, bringing agentic AI development to desktop. 

Cassidy Williams, senior director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub, showed off a demo of the GitHub Copilot app, using it to code on the fly with multistep demands.

"This app is your home base for development and operations on your computer," Williams said. "I have access to all the most popular models via my single GitHub Copilot subscription, including those from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, and see all of them in our model picker."

Copilot can request a different AI model while you use the GitHub app, switching from GPT 5.5 to Claude Opus 4.8 during the live demo. 

June 2, 2026 at 11:58 AM PDT

June 2, 2026 at 11:54 AM PDT

Autonomous AI agents similar to OpenClaw are coming to Copilot and are being built into Microsoft's apps. These agents, called Autopilots, are essentially "enterprise-grade claws," Nadella said.

The agents will be rolled out over time and will eventually become a full suite.

"They're a totally new way to reduce toil and get you back to what you love," Nadella said.

The first is called Scout. It can keep an eye on your Outlook inbox and Teams messages to monitor things that need your attention and help you prepare for meetings and tasks. 

Nadella said more agents will become available in the coming months, and you'll eventually be able to build your own. 

June 2, 2026 at 11:32 AM PDT

It's a veritable party of tech CEOs at this keynote -- the chief exec of chip giant Qualcomm spoke about the future of AI wearables, smartphones and the tech needed to power them.

"Agents really change the whole nature of the device in itself," Cristiano Amon said in a prerecorded chat with Nadella played during the keynote.

Microsoft and Qualcomm are partnering to build a new agent-first computing platform. Qualcomm is one of many chip manufacturers that are working to build hardware that can run advanced, compute-intensive AI models on devices. Having chips fit to run AI on smaller devices like phones and wearables requires a lot of efficiency.

"You need a very power-efficient CPU," Amon said, referring to building an agentic AI ecosystem. "It's a much more personalized and bespoke experience than an app in itself. And I think that's changing the nature of devices, and even the definition of a wearable platform is changing."

Integrating AI into devices like your smartphone will fundamentally change your experience with them, he predicted. 

But not everyone will want AI integrated into their smartphones and devices. A CNET survey last year found that only 11% of smartphone owners would choose to upgrade for AI features, and 3 in 10 said they don't find mobile AI helpful.

June 2, 2026 at 11:24 AM PDT

With Microsoft predicting that AI tools will soon make more online searches than humans, the tech giant has built a Bing for AI agents called Web IQ. It's a new suite of APIs that helps AI agents scrape the web faster and more comprehensively.

The Web IQ APIs, which are a component of Microsoft IQ, have already been used to power both Microsoft's own AI offering, Copilot, as well as OpenAI's ChatGPT "for quite some time." 

You can read more about Microsoft Web IQ in my interview with Jordi Ribas, Microsoft's president of search and AI.

June 2, 2026 at 11:09 AM PDT

Microsoft is letting the lobster loose. Kind of.

A new system, called Microsoft Execution Containers, or MXC, will allow you to create secure containers in which to run AI agents. That includes OpenClaw, the viral AI sensation that allows you to run autonomous, always-on agents. The presenters, Scott Hanselman and Samantha Song, said they were using OpenClaw agents for monitoring health and as a triathlon coach, respectively.

The OpenClaw Windows app uses MXC to restrict agents from making changes to certain files and folders, so it can't run rampant. In the demo, Song asked OpenClaw to delete all of the files on Hanselman's desktop. Despite having all of the OpenClaw safety layers turned off, the agent was unable to delete all the files because of the Windows sandbox.

OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joined the presentation and said he was glad OpenClaw failed to delete desktop files, "because six months ago that totally would've worked."

Steinberger said OpenClaw has worked with companies like Microsoft to add security layers so that the agent's access is not "all or nothing." That means the tool could find its way into companies as corporate IT administrators sweat the risks less.

"We're entering a new era of building with agents," Steinberger said. "More capability for the people who don't code, and more power for those who do. And we get to build it together, in the open."

June 2, 2026 at 11:03 AM PDT

While we're all watching Microsoft's presentation, the White House dropped a potentially major change to how frontier AI models are released. President Donald Trump's new executive order requires federal agencies to create a process that would ask AI developers to give the feds access to certain advanced models up to 30 days before releasing them to others, so that the government can assess any new cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

The order comes after Anthropic said its most powerful model, dubbed Claude Mythos Preview, found so many vulnerabilities that the company gave a group of partners an early heads-up to patch holes before the model goes public.

This wouldn't be mandatory, but voluntary, and would only apply to specific frontier models.

June 2, 2026 at 10:54 AM PDT

"It's a turnkey solution for building unique agent-first devices," Bathiche said, as he showed off an early prototype. 

"The Access Badge, built using Qualcomm silicon for wearables -- this digital badge is a lightweight form factor designed for agent interactions on the go," he said. You can unlock the badge with your fingerprint and use verbal commands to control the AI agent. 

During the demo, he asked the badge to take photos for a social media post, using it to scan the crowd at the Build keynote. He asked Copilot to find some good shots from the audience scan, clean them up and send them to him and his team for review.

Microsoft is already working with AccuWeather, Best Buy, CVS Health, Levi Strauss and Target on the badge.

The other device Microsoft unveiled was a stationery-agentic AI MediaTek device, powered by Microsoft's new Work IQ. Microsoft Work IQ provides workplace context for AI agents working in organizations, including access across Microsoft 365 -- like emails, documents and meetings -- and will be generally available on June 16. 

Microsoft did not have a prototype of the MediaTek device on hand (which looks like those table-side payment terminals used in restaurants), and no news on when it could launch, but said it's designed to be kept on your desk at work.

"Just walking up to the device securely signs you in, giving you direct access to your matrix ... this means frictionless yet protected access to Microsoft 365 Copilot grounded in Work IQ, and with a simple glance at surfaces what matters next in your workday, helping you think, plan and even act by delegating tasks to your agents with a simple tap or just using your voice," Bathiche said.

"Think of it as a dedicated secured agent device for work. It even supports experiences like handoff between devices, acting as a companion to your existing Windows PC, or you can even let you access your cloud PC through Windows 365 and a connective monitor."

The screen behind Bathiche displayed images of wearables like smart glasses and smart watches, as well as tablets and screens. 

"This is the moment to imagine where your agents should live, what form they should take and what new work they can unlock," Bathiche said.

June 2, 2026 at 10:44 AM PDT

Outside the Microsoft Build keynote, people are protesting data centers, as witnessed by CNET Senior Editor Corinne Reichert, who is attending the event.

June 2, 2026 at 10:27 AM PDT

"We've been working for a decade and a half together, getting ready for, really, what happened in the last several months," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. "All of a sudden, because of agentic systems, the convergence of these rules, AI is now useful."

Microsoft and Nvidia have a long history of working together -- Microsoft bringing the software and laptops, Nvidia bringing the chips and firepower to run them. So it's not totally surprising to see Huang dial into the keynote from the Computex trade show currently going on in Taiwan. 

The two tech titans talked about what it means to be building the future of computing. Unsurprisingly, they say it's all about having autonomous AI systems, including agents, playing a big role. Agentic systems are one of the biggest recent developments in the AI revolution. The idea is to have AI-powered bots, agents or claws running tasks and completing assignments without human babysitting. 

"It's clear that agentic systems are useful, that it's doing productive work, and also tokens are now profitable as a result," Huang said.

June 2, 2026 at 10:03 AM PDT

Nvidia announced plans to bring Windows to its DGX Station platform the other day at Computex, but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gave it a shoutout at the start of the keynote.

The DGX Station is a powerful supercomputer that can sit right at your desk and handle a trillion-parameter AI model locally. That's roughly the size of Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.6, perhaps the most powerful open-source model available now.

"It's pretty crazy to think that we've come this far to where you can now have a data center on your desktop," Nadella said.

A theme from Nadella's opening comments was that we're increasingly reaching the point where AI models can be used on hardware you own, rather than operating in the cloud. There are a lot of advantages to using AI on your own computer, namely that you don't have to pay for the usage. 

June 2, 2026 at 9:48 AM PDT

CEO Satya Nadella opens Microsoft Build with a question for developers: "If there's one key takeaway, it would be this: How do you all participate fully in this frontier intelligence ecosystem?"

He continues, "It's not about any one piece of technology that you hear about, or even the platform itself. It's about the value that you can build, you can compound, you can create on top of the platform."

By "frontier intelligence ecosystem," it's safe to assume Nadella is talking about an AI-first approach.

June 2, 2026 at 9:06 AM PDT

CNET is on the ground in the Festival Pavilion in Fort Mason for Microsoft Build's opening keynote. The address is slated to begin at 9:30 a.m. PT.

You can watch the keynote on CNET's livestream on YouTube and check back here for all the biggest updates.

June 2, 2026 at 8:20 AM PDT

Microsoft Build kicks off just days before Apple holds its own developer conference, WWDC 2026. The two companies have been intertwined since the 1980s and yet, in 2026, they couldn't be more different. Microsoft still makes Windows, but its pursuit of AI with Copilot seems to take top billing as of late. Apple is a very successful hardware and software company that's trying to find its footing in AI and appears to be well behind Microsoft and others. Today's Build keynote doesn't even concern Apple -- it's more Google, OpenAI and Anthropic that Microsoft should be worried about.

While Apple has had a lot of success with its wait-and-see approach to new categories, Apple Intelligence hasn't made much of a splash. Apple seems stuck in terms of AI -- albeit in the context of a very successful product, software and services business. This year's WWDC will also be significant because it will be the last major event with Tim Cook as Apple's CEO.

June 2, 2026 at 7:47 AM PDT

We expect to hear a lot about software today. This is, after all, a developer conference. But all that software has to run on something, and we got a glimpse of some interesting new hardware the other day at the Computex trade show in Taiwan. 

Nvidia announced a new Arm-based system-on-a-chip platform for Windows, the RTX Spark, which Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said is "reinventing the personal computer."

The lineup, expected to ship this fall, includes laptops from Microsoft, Dell, Asus, HP, Lenovo and MSI along with mini desktops. 

The key thing is that these are computers built specifically to handle on-device AI tasks, especially inference, which is when a model actually does its "thinking" to get things done. That'll be done on a laptop platform built for agents, which are AI bots that can perform tasks independently. So keep that in mind as you hear the word "agent" many more times today. 

June 2, 2026 at 7:15 AM PDT

Tuesday's kickoff for Microsoft Build comes on the heels of Google I/O, which was filled with Gemini expansions into agentic AI. Google previewed new versions of Gemini: Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini Spark and a tease for Gemini 3.5 Pro.

June 2, 2026 at 6:45 AM PDT

Speaking on Monday night at a Build event, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said one of the difficulties with new AI tools is "how do we figure out how to make these capabilities more valuable" so that people will actually use them. 

"Pure human psychology ... is throttling things," Scott said. 

In other words, people need proof that this new way of doing things is better than the way they're used to. That's particularly so when it comes to agentic AI, which he said requires a lot of trust. 

"We need to think really quite hard about what does it mean to build trustworthy software," Scott said, adding that not until people trust the software will they hand over control of their devices to an autonomous assistant. 

And last, he said that creating a tool with artificial intelligence doesn't automatically make it useful.

"Just because you are using AI to create a lot of activity does not necessarily mean the activity you're creating is valuable," he said, referencing a "meme chat app" he created solely to irritate his children. 

June 2, 2026 at 6:20 AM PDT

CNET's Faith Chihil and Corinne Reichert have arrived at Microsoft Build 2026, having collected their badges from the media registration area the night before the keynote kicks off the conference.

June 2, 2026 at 6:18 AM PDT

There's no shame in asking the question -- what is Microsoft Build, anyway? The technical answer is that it's Microsoft's annual developer conference, where the tech giant shares updates and other progress reports on its software products. The more interesting answer is that's all we know for sure. 

Developer conferences are opportunities for companies to tease new projects, show off experimental tools and introduce us to the next generation of the company. In recent years, Microsoft's Build conferences been all about AI, so we expect to hear a lot about Copilot today.