Nvidia began selling the first Windows laptops built around its new RTX Spark chip on Friday, and the company's chief executive marked the launch with an unannounced appearance in Berlin. Jensen Huang turned up in the evening at the Saturn electronics store on Alexanderplatz, where he greeted a crowd gathered in the Xperion gaming area on the building's third floor, according to Tagesspiegel.
The visit came as Nvidia held seven launch events around the world. Berlin was the only one with the CEO in attendance, the paper reported.
Why it matters
Nvidia is currently the most valuable publicly traded company on the planet, worth more than five trillion dollars on the stock market. A sitting chief executive of that stature appearing without warning in a German retail store is unusual, and Huang used the trip to explain why Germany matters to the company.
"Germany is our largest European location," the 63-year-old said, citing telecommunications, robotics, autonomous vehicles and a broad base of AI research in the country. He described Berlin as a beautiful and international city that draws scientists and researchers from around the world, and said the combination of those factors led Nvidia to choose it.
A chip that shares one pool of memory
The RTX Spark combines a central processor and a graphics processor on a single platform running Windows 11. In conventional laptops the graphics card has its own, usually smaller, memory. With the new chip, both processors draw on the same memory, which can hold up to 128 GB.
Nvidia argues this benefits AI work done on the device itself. Larger models and AI agents can run locally without sending data to the cloud, which the company frames as an advantage for both cost and privacy. It also means AI tools remain usable on trains and other places where internet connections are unreliable.
"Our development is the biggest leap there has ever been for Windows," Huang said at the event.
Devices carrying the chip include Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra, priced from 2,899 euros, along with machines from HP, MSI, ASUS and Lenovo. Some retailers will not ship certain models until the second half of November.
Despite the gaming setting, Nvidia is not aiming first at gamers. The target buyers are developers, the self-employed and small and medium-sized businesses that want to run their own AI applications on their own hardware.
Prizes, a student from Rostock and a word on cars
Around 500 enthusiasts attended, Tagesspiegel reported, and five AI laptops were given away. Huang signed each one.
The winners produced some odd encounters for a Friday evening at Alexanderplatz. Hassan, who came across the launch event by chance, said he would use the powerful machine for gaming; Huang advised him to "start soon doing something useful with it." What the second winner, Katja, plans to do with hers was lost in the noise of the crowd. The third, Nrh, moved to Germany six years ago to study and travelled from Rostock for the event; he intends to use the notebook for his studies.
Huang also addressed the German car industry, which is currently in crisis. He said Nvidia has not given up on it. "Of course Germany is extremely important to us, since we maintain close partnerships with the automotive industry," he said, describing collaboration across a vehicle's whole life cycle — from styling and design through engineering, simulation and manufacturing to the technology inside autonomous cars.
Asked whether Berlin might become the company's headquarters, Huang smiled. "Nvidia's headquarters is wherever I am right now," he said, adding that the company has excellent offices worldwide and a great site in Berlin.
What to watch
The store visit served as a prelude to GTC Berlin, Nvidia's AI conference running from 20 to 22 October at the Tempodrom, where Huang delivers the keynote on 21 October. According to Handelsblatt, Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Huang also plan to announce an AI partnership on Monday at the "Invest in Germany" summit at the European School of Management and Technology on Schlossplatz. The report says the German government would put in a sum in the hundreds of millions, Nvidia would contribute engineers and chips, and about a dozen German companies, among them Siemens and Audi, would take part.
