Microsoft Revives Gates' Vision with Local AI

Microsoft is revisiting Bill Gates' vision of putting a computer on every desk and in every home, but this time with an even more ambitious agenda. The company wants to bring 'unmetered intelligence' to every home and every desk, which means AI that doesn't depend on cloud inference for its functionality.

At the IFA 2026 conference, Mark Linton, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President for Windows and Device Sales, stated that the new vision is to have 'unmetered intelligence on every desk and in every home.' He emphasized that this means AI models can run locally on a powerful enough PC without relying on cloud computing.

The company has already started working on making this possible through its Windows ML platform, which will make it practical for different hardware tiers to handle local AI tasks. This is part of the 'token economics' mentioned by Linton, where smaller models can run locally and reduce latency.

Microsoft is also collaborating with NVIDIA to bring this vision to life. The RTX Spark, a powerful chip with 1 petaflop of AI performance, is being used to load local AI models with up to 200 billion parameters. This requires new hardware and software work from Microsoft, including rebuilding Windows' scheduler and memory management.