Microsoft announces seven new AI models, Surface RTX dev box, and quantum chip at Build 2026

Microsoft revealed seven new in-house AI models during Build 2026, including MAI-Thinking-1, which it describes as its first reasoning model. MAI-Thinking-1 offers 35 billion active parameters and a 128K context window designed for complex multi-step instructions, long-context reasoning, and code generation.

The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, equipped with Nvidia's Arm-based Spark RTX chip and 128GB of unified memory, is geared toward developers who want to run local AI models on their device. It comes preinstalled with Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot, along with a preconfigured version of Windows 11 Pro.

Microsoft launched Scout, an always-on assistant built on OpenClaw (an open-source AI platform) that works with Microsoft 365 apps including Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams. Scout is part of a broader set of 'Autopilot' agents and is launching in desktop preview for Frontier customers in the US.

Microsoft revealed its next-gen quantum computing chip, called Majorana 2, which contains qubits that are 1,000 times more accurate than previous versions. Microsoft says it could reach its goal of making a practical quantum computer by 2029.