The Information daily tech news digest

The Information’s TITV: Tech news and analysis. Every weekday at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET. Now streaming → → Oct 08, 2026 The Information AM Supported by Save 25% on an annual subscription to read the most important news about technology and business first. For even more, Save $250 on The Information Pro for unlimited access to our proprietary org charts, databases and surveys. Happy Thursday! Microsoft unveils Nvidia-powered PCs for running AI models on-device. Elon Musk says Grok Bot will sometimes use models from rival companies. Former executives from Google, Apple and Nvidia launch a company that aims to ease the GPU crunch. Read more briefings 1. Microsoft Debuts Nvidia-Powered PCs with On-Device AI, Following Apple’s Breakout Hit By Aaron Holmes Source: The Information Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled its latest effort to run AI in PCs powered by its Windows software, rather than running the AI in the cloud, which the company said would bring down costs for customers. The announcement is Microsoft’s response to Apple’s Mac Mini, which has become a hit with AI customers and app developers because of its ability to run models directly on the device. Microsoft is also trying to show enterprise customers that AI can run securely on company-owned computers. Microsoft said its forthcoming Surface computers powered by Nvidia chips, which the company previewed earlier this year, will start at $2,599, while a more powerful PC, Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, will start at $5,999. An even more powerful Nvidia-powered PC, DGX Station, will be capable of running large AI models (with as many as 1 trillion parameters, or settings tied to the model) on the device, such as Meta’s Llama 4 Maverick or DeepSeek’s V4-Flash. It will also be capable of streaming complex videogames like Call of Duty from the cloud starting next year. Microsoft didn’t disclose pricing or say when the device would be available. Microsoft also said its Copilot AI software will use a model router to automatically run some AI tasks to run locally on the Nvidia-powered PCs, using Microsoft’s relatively cheap MAI-Code-1.1 model, for instance. And Windows customers will be able to direct Copilot to generate custom applications, such as desktop widgets or webpage prototypes, that the PC can host locally on their device, further driving down costs, the company said. Finally, Microsoft said it was adding new governance controls to Windows to let companies control how employees’ own AI agents, such as those powered by OpenClaw or Perplexity, can access certain files. The features will become available in Windows 11 later this month. 2. Musk Says SpaceX Will Sometimes Use Rival Models to Power Grok Bot By Grace Kay Source: The Information Elon Musk announced on Tuesday night that SpaceX’s AI unit will now use some AI models from competitors to power Grok Bot, signaling a shift away from relying exclusively on models developed in-house. “Going forward, @SpaceX will use the best back end model for any given task, including Claude Opus 5.5, MidJourney, Suno and other leading APIs. Whatever is most likely to give you the best outcome,” Musk wrote on X. The approach means the Grok Bot interface could act as a front-end that routes user requests to different AI systems depending on which model is best suited to a particular task. For example, SpaceX could use Claude for reasoning tasks and Midjourney for image generation. Grok Bot is designed as an always on AI agent that can perform tasks autonomously across websites, email, and other applications. The move could have larger implications for SpaceX’s AI division, which has been trying to catch up with Anthropic and OpenAI and has lost many of its AI research staff over the last year. The company acquired the coding startup Cursor earlier this year to help bolster its coding efforts. SpaceX has increasingly begun selling its compute to rival AI labs, including Anthropic and Google since the spring. 3. Former G