[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang (황치규)] Microsoft on June 2 (local time) unveiled the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a desktop supercomputer for developing AI agents, at its annual Build developer conference.

The company said the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box offers up to 1 petaflop of AI computing performance and 128 gigabytes of unified memory. It can run models with up to 120 billion parameters under 4-bit quantisation. Microsoft plans to launch the product in the United States within this year.

The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is a Windows device. It supports native GPU passthrough on WSL 2 and Nvidia's AI software CUDA.

Native GPU passthrough refers to a technology in which a virtual machine (VM) is directly allocated the host (physical computer) GPU without hypervisor control, allowing it to be used at near-native performance.

The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box also comes with development tools such as Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot by default.

Microsoft also introduced software to make Windows an "agent-native runtime". The Microsoft Execution Container (MXC), released as a preview, supports developers and IT administrators in creating enterprise sandbox environments so they can run agents in isolation.

MXC covers creating agent boundaries at the operating system level, managing inference, enforcing policies, masking personally identifiable information and limiting visibility into systems and data. For the cloud, a hosting agent function is being offered in preview through the Foundry Agent Service that supports session-by-session isolated execution, persistent memory and elastic scaling.

Microsoft also released a preview of a GitHub Copilot app for developers. Developers can start work from a natural-language idea, an existing issue or a code merge suggestion, then coordinate multiple agents in parallel through review and integration to the final merge. In the process, Copilot uses Git worktrees to handle multiple branch tasks, while developers retain control.

Microsoft also officially launched Discovery, an AI platform for scientific research.