Microsoft Build 2026: The 7 Biggest Announcements

Microsoft just kicked off Build 2026 with a keynote from CEO Satya Nadella and other company leaders. As expected, it was packed with announcements, from new Surface devices to an always-on personal assistant and updates via Microsoft’s internal AI models.

If you’re not watching the event live, you can catch up on the latest news in the roundup below.

The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is designed for developers who want to run native AI models on their devices, serving as an alternative to… Qualcomm’s development kit has been cancelled. Comes equipped Nvidia’s new Arm-based Spark RTX chip And 128GB of unified memory, along with pre-installed applications like Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot. The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box also has a pre-configured version of Windows 11 Pro with dark mode enabled by default, a simplified taskbar, and no widgets.

Microsoft hasn’t revealed pricing or the full list of specifications yet, but the device will be available in the US later this year.

Microsoft is taking steps to make Windows more developer-friendly. This includes the addition of Coreutils, which the company describes as “Linux-like command-line utilities that run natively” to Windows 11. It also launches the ability to create, run, and interact with Linux containers through the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), along with a new Intelligent Terminal that provides context for a developer’s preferred AI-powered agent.

We took a look at Project Solara, an Android-based operating system designed to run agents across a variety of devices. Microsoft partnered with Qualcomm and MediaTek to develop the system, which could eventually serve as a PC companion or hand off tasks between devices. During the keynote, Microsoft showed off two models of devices the technology might work on: a desktop hub and a digital badge.

Microsoft is launching an always-on assistant built on OpenClaw, the open source AI platform that gained popularity earlier this year. The assistant, called Scout, works with Microsoft 365 apps including Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams. It’s designed to perform tasks in the background, helping businesses do things like organize calendars, manage expense reports, write emails, and more.

Scouting is part of a Wider set of “autopilot” agents. Which Microsoft plans to launch, each of which will have its own “identity.” Right now, Scout is launching in desktop preview to Frontier customers in the US, but Microsoft plans to eventually make it available to more people.

Microsoft is moving forward with its work to create its own AI models rather than relying on those created by OpenAI. He – she It revealed seven new models During construction, including the model that you say is the first inference model. MAI-Thinking-1 offers 35 billion active parameters and a 128K context window, which Microsoft says is designed for “complex multi-step instructions, long-context reasoning, and code generation.” It also announced updates across its templates that focus on creating images, audio, and code, as well as transcription.

Speaking of OpenClaw, Microsoft is trying to make its AI agents safer to run something These are called Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC).. This allows developers to put up guardrails for what AI agents can access on their devices. Microsoft is also launching a companion app for OpenClaw that will allow you to set up your own agent or connect to existing agents, which will run in an isolated environment.

Microsoft unveiled its next-generation quantum computing chip during the event, called Majorana 2, which the company says could accelerate its progress in this field. The upgraded chip contains qubits – the units of information in quantum computing – and is 1,000 times more precise. Microsoft attributes the increase in performance to a new set of materials that use lead and other compounds.

As things progress, Microsoft says it could reach its goal of making a practical quantum computer by 2029.