IT Brief Ireland - Technology news for CIOs & IT decision-makers
Ireland
Nvidia starts selling RTX Spark laptops from USD $2,599

Nvidia starts selling RTX Spark laptops from USD $2,599

Thu, 12th Nov 2026 (Today)
Sean Mitchell
SEAN MITCHELL Publisher

Nvidia has started selling RTX Spark laptops through Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI, with prices starting at USD $2,599.

The systems combine an Nvidia Blackwell RTX graphics processor and an Nvidia Grace central processor in a single-chip design for thin-and-light Windows laptops. They offer up to 128GB of unified memory and up to 1 petaflop of FP4 AI performance, targeting software development, content creation and gaming on portable machines.

The launch marks the commercial arrival of a product line Nvidia has used to push local AI workloads from the data centre to personal computers. The laptops are as thin as 14mm and weigh as little as three pounds, while sharing a single memory pool across graphics, AI models and other workloads.

Nvidia also used the rollout to introduce software and model updates tied to the RTX Spark platform. These include support for a new speech model called Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, GPU resource controls in Nvidia App, compatibility with Liquid AI's LFM3 family of models, and gaming updates for titles including Phantom Blade Zero and Minecraft through RTX Remix.

Speech model

Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe is an open-weight speech model designed to handle transcription, speaker attribution, translation and audio question answering in one system. It supports 40 languages, including seven Indic languages, and can be guided with plain-language prompts.

Developers can ask the model to transcribe a meeting, identify speakers, translate audio into English or extract decisions from a conversation. Prompts can also include industry-specific terms and formatting rules, which could help users in sectors such as healthcare, financial services and customer service.

Nvidia said the model ranks first on the Hugging Face Open ASR leaderboard and second among open-weight models on Artificial Analysis. According to the company, it uses about 4.3 billion active parameters, 80% fewer than the top-ranked open-weight rival.

Open weights let developers choose where audio is processed, whether on a desktop machine or in the cloud. Quantised versions are due to run locally on RTX Spark and DGX Spark systems, Jetson AGX Thor devices and Blackwell data centre graphics processors.

Local AI

Another update gives users direct control over how background AI agents and foreground applications share graphics processing resources. The new setting appears in the advanced system section of Nvidia App and lets users prioritise either the active application or long-running background tasks.

The feature addresses a practical issue for AI-enabled personal computers, where multiple workloads can compete for the same processor resources. On a laptop used for editing, development or gaming, that balance can affect both responsiveness and the speed of AI tasks running in parallel.

Liquid AI's LFM3 model family is also being made available on RTX Spark through llama.cpp and vLLM. Nvidia said the models cover text, vision, audio and decision tasks and can be fine-tuned locally.

The model family is intended for use cases such as inbox triage, calendar management, document reading, screen analysis, speech transcription, spoken question answering and support request routing. Nvidia also said the latest 1.7-billion-parameter base model outperforms Liquid AI's previous 2.6-billion-parameter version.

Games focus

Nvidia tied the laptop availability announcement to several gaming updates intended to showcase the machines' graphics features. Phantom Blade Zero launches with ray tracing and Nvidia DLSS 4.5 support, according to the company, following work with developer and publisher S-GAME.

For Minecraft Java Edition 1.21.1, RTX Remix 1.6 adds path tracing and DLSS support. Nvidia said the update also brings native RTX Spark support, new rendering features and workflow changes for modders using Portal with RTX and the Half-Life 2 RTX demo.

Outside the laptop range, DGX Spark 64GB is now available through manufacturing partners. The product uses the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip and is aimed at developers and researchers building and running AI models locally.

Nvidia also said Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB is now available for local voice assistants, game characters and embedded interfaces, while a larger Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B 24GB model is intended for more demanding agent workloads on RTX Spark.

RTX Spark laptops are shipping now, with 128GB configurations already on retail shelves, giving Nvidia an early chance to test demand for premium Windows machines that combine local AI processing with gaming and creator features at prices starting above USD $2,500.