Finally, Someone Is Making an AI Desktop

A strange quirk of AI computers, from Chomebook Plus to Copilot+, is that most of them so far have been laptops. There’s no reason desktops couldn’t run AI features like Recall, and that's something Qualcomm addressed during its Computex keynote on Sunday, where it hinted it might be working on a more stationary Copilot+ PC.

While advertising the company’s AI-forward Snapdragon X chips, Qualcomm CEO Christiano Amon told the crowd Snapdragon X and Copilot+ are “coming to all PC form factors,” while showing a slide that seemed to show Copilot+ running on a laptop, a few tablets, and most notably, a desktop computer.

During its own keynote, AMD showed that Qualcomm won’t be the only chip company powering Copilot+ machines, but even taking competing CPU manufacturers into account, this is the first time anyone has hinted at a Copilot+ desktop (outside of a dev kit, which can be difficult to get your hands on and isn’t really meant for the average user).

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That’s about all the company was willing to share for now. The rest of Qualcomm’s conference focused on pushing Copilot+ in general, as well as the general performance of the Snapdragon X Elite chip.

Snapdragon X and Copilot+ on desktop could come in one of two forms. First is the Apple iMac approach, which would see Microsoft and its partner manufacturers putting Qualcomm’s laptop AI chips in a desktop and calling it a day. Alternatively, Qualcomm could design a more powerful Snapdragon X chip meant to take better advantage of the additional space a full PC tower would provide. The latter would certainly take more work, as Qualcomm would have to make sure its chip would play nice with GPUs and other components from fellow PC parts manufacturers.

The first Copilot+ laptops are set to launch on June 18, with models coming from Dell, Asus, Microsoft, and more, so it will probably take some time until another wave launches.