Microsoft reveals new cloudy AI PC that’s not a Copilot+ PC

Microsoft has created a new type of AI PC – the “Windows 365 AI-enabled Cloud PC”.

Readers may recall that in late 2023 the term “AI PC” entered common use to describe PCs packing a neural processing unit (NPU). Microsoft then decided to define a new term – the “Copilot+ PC” – to describe PCs it feels are well-suited to running its Copilot AI because their NPUs perform at 40 TOPS or more.

Now, Microsoft has defined the “AI-enabled Cloud PC” that appears not to have an NPU at all, as the company says they run on “all 8 vCPU Cloud PCs” in certain Azure regions under the Windows 365 cloudy PC service.

Some Windows 365 instance types that offer 8 vCPUs also include GPUs, so perhaps an AI-enabled Cloud PC can tap those accelerators.

Microsoft also says AI-enabled Cloud PCs “dynamically adapt compute power for more on-demand performance, streamed securely from the ...