Live from Microsoft Build 2026: Follow Along for Copilot AI News and More

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Project Solara: New chip for "agent-first devices"

By Corinne Reichert

An image of Satya Nadella at the Microsoft Build keynote 2026

During the Microsoft Build keynote, the company's CEO and chairman, Satya Nadella, announced Project Solara, billed as a "new chip-to-cloud platform" for AI agent devices.

Steven Bathiche, who founded and leads Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group, demonstrated onstage a new portable device built with Qualcomm silicon.

"It's a turnkey solution for building unique agent-first devices," said Bathiche as he showed off an early prototype.

Project Solara Microsoft Build 2026 keynote

"The Access Badge, built using Qualcomm silicon for wearables -- this digital badge is a lightweight form factor designed for agent interactions on the go," he said. You can unlock the badge with your fingerprint and use verbal commands to control the AI agent.

During the demo, he asked the badge to take photos for a social media post, using it to scan the crowd at the Build keynote. He asked Copilot to find some good shots from the audience scan, to clean them up and then to send them to him and his team to review.

Microsoft is already working with AccuWeather, Best Buy, CVS Health, Levi Strauss and Target on the badge.

The other device Microsoft unveiled was a stationery-agentic AI MediaTek device, powered by Microsoft's new Work IQ. Microsoft Work IQ provides workplace context for AI agents working in organizations, including access across Microsoft 365 -- like emails, documents and meetings -- and will be generally available on June 16.

Microsoft did not have a prototype of the MediaTek device on hand (which looks like those table-side payment terminals used in restaurants), and no news on when it could launch, but said it's designed to be kept on your desk at work.

"Just walking up to the device securely signs you in, giving you direct access to your matrix ... this means frictionless yet protected access to Microsoft 365 Copilot grounded in Work IQ, and with a simple glance at surfaces what matters next in your workday, helping you think, plan and even act by delegating tasks to your agents with a simple tap or just using your voice," Bathiche said. "Think of it as a dedicated secured agent device for work. It even supports experiences like handoff between devices, acting as a companion to your existing Windows PC, or you can even let you access your cloud PC through Windows 365 and a connective monitor."

An image of Microsoft announcing Project Solara during the Build 2026 keynote

The screen behind Bathiche displayed images of wearables like smart glasses and smart watches, as well as tablets and screens.

"This is the moment to imagine where your agents should live, what form they should take and what new work they can unlock," Bathiche said.

Microsoft's new data centers will use the same amount of water as a restaurant

By Patrick Holland

Satya Nadella speaking at Microsoft Build 2026

"Perhaps the most important design criteria for us is, 'How do we earn the permission from the communities in which we're making these data centers?'" says Nadella.

Data centers are essential to the growth of AI and its capabilities. But many of them create noise and light pollution and take a toll on a community's utilities, such as water and electricity. At Microsoft Build 2026, Nadella laid out how Microsoft is taking "a new approach" to its data centers, with plans to improve cooling systems and reduce water use. Natella says that these new data centers would consume much less water than the current ones do.

"The cooling group is filled once in the data center, which can operate effectively with zero water consumption," he said. "In fact, the daily water usage over the course of an entire year is roughly equivalent to what a single restaurant would use."

How much water does a single restaurant use in a year? 2 million gallons per year, according to a post on the site KitchenSpot.

Outside the Microsoft Build keynote, people are protesting data centers, as witnessed by CNET Senior Editor Corinne Reichert, who is attending the event.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: 'AI is now useful'

By Katelyn Chedraoui

"We've been working for a decade and a half together, getting ready for, really, what happened in the last several months," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. "All of a sudden, because of agentic systems, the convergence of these rules, AI is now useful."

Microsoft and Nvidia have a long history of working together -- Microsoft bringing the software and laptops, Nvidia bringing the chips and firepower to run them. So it's not totally surprising to see Huang dial into the keynote from the Computex trade show currently going on in Taiwan.

The two tech titans talked about what it means to be building the future of computing. Unsurprisingly, they say it's all about having autonomous AI systems, including agents, playing a big role. Agentic systems are one of the biggest recent developments in the AI revolution. The idea is to have AI-powered bots, agents or claws running tasks and completing assignments without human babysitting.

"It's clear that agentic systems are useful, that it's doing productive work, and also tokens are now profitable as a result," Huang said.

A data center on your desktop?

By Jon Reed

Satya Nadella stands on stage with a white screen reading "Developer-optimized Windows" behind him.

Nvidia announced plans to bring Windows to its DGX Station platform the other day at Computex, but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gave it a shoutout at the start of the keynote.

The DGX Station is a powerful supercomputer that can sit right at your desk and handle a trillion-parameter AI model locally. That's roughly the size of Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.6, perhaps the most powerful open-source model available now.

"It's pretty crazy to think that we've come this far to where you can now have a data center on your desktop," Nadella said.

A theme from Nadella's opening comments was that we're increasingly reaching the point where AI models can be used on hardware you own, rather than operating in the cloud. There are a lot of advantages to using AI on your own computer, namely that you don't have to pay for the usage.

And we're off: Satya Nadella takes the stage

By Katelyn Chedraoui

Satya Nadella on stage at Microsoft Build 2026

CEO Satya Nadella opens Microsoft Build with a question for developers: "If there's one key takeaway, it would be this: How do you all participate fully in this frontier intelligence ecosystem?"

He continues, "It's not about any one piece of technology that you hear about, or even the platform itself. It's about the value that you can build, you can compound, you can create on top of the platform."

By "frontier intelligence ecosystem," it's safe to assume Nadella is talking about an AI-first approach.

Less than 30 minutes to keynote kick off!

By Katelyn Chedraoui

CNET's Faith Chihil and Corinne Reichert at Microsoft Build, selfie

CNET is on the ground in the Festival Pavilion in Fort Mason for Microsoft Build's opening keynote. The address is slated to begin at 9:30 a.m. PT.

Three pictures of the Microsoft Build crowd and stage

You can watch the keynote on CNET's livestream on YouTube and check back here for all the biggest updates.

Ahead of Apple's WWDC conference next week, Microsoft has nothing to lose

By Patrick Holland

Microsoft Build kicks off just days before Apple holds its own developer conference, WWDC 2026. The two companies have been intertwined since the 1980s and yet, in 2026, they couldn't be more different. Microsoft still makes Windows, but its pursuit of AI with Copilot seems to take top billing as of late. Apple is a very successful hardware and software company that's trying to find its footing in AI and appears to be well behind Microsoft and others. Today's Build keynote doesn't even concern Apple -- it's more Google, OpenAI and Anthropic that Microsoft should be worried about.

While Apple has had a lot of success with its wait-and-see approach to new categories, Apple Intelligence hasn't made much of a splash. Apple seems stuck in terms of AI -- albeit in the context of a very successful product, software and services business. This year's WWDC will also be significant because it will be the last major event with Tim Cook as Apple's CEO.

We've already seen some big hardware news

By Jon Reed

We expect to hear a lot about software today. This is, after all, a developer conference. But all that software has to run on something, and we got a glimpse of some interesting new hardware the other day at the Computex trade show in Taiwan.

Nvidia announced a new Arm-based system-on-a-chip platform for Windows, the RTX Spark, which Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said is "reinventing the personal computer."

The lineup, expected to ship this fall, includes laptops from Microsoft, Dell, Asus, HP, Lenovo and MSI along with mini desktops.

The key thing is that these are computers built specifically to handle on-device AI tasks, especially inference, which is when a model actually does its "thinking" to get things done. That'll be done on a laptop platform built for agents, which are AI bots that can perform tasks independently. So keep that in mind as you hear the word "agent" many more times today.

What Microsoft has to prove after Google I/O

By Patrick Holland

gemini presentation by josh woodward at google i/o 2026 event

Tuesday's kickoff for Microsoft Build comes on the heels of Google I/O, which was filled with Gemini expansions into agentic AI. Google previewed new versions of Gemini: Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini Spark and a tease for Gemini 3.5 Pro.

There were also Gemini-powered features shown off in Maps, YouTube and Google Docs that support verbal prompts that are more natural, rambling or, as Google CEO Sundar Pichai described it, "a verbal brain dump." We saw the debut of Gemini Omni, a hyperrealistic video generation tool that can also augment real videos of people, all from verbal prompts.

Google set the bar pretty high for Microsoft. It will be interesting to see how far along Copilot AI is compared to Google's announcements and whether we'll see new features that match it. Though how wild would it be for Microsoft to announce Copilot-powered smartglasses to rival the Android XR specs that Google showed off at I/O!

Microsoft CTO: Making AI more usable

By Corinne Reichert

Speaking on Monday night at a Build event, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said one of the difficulties with new AI tools is "how do we figure out how to make these capabilities more valuable" so that people will actually use them.

"Pure human psychology ... is throttling things," Scott said.

In other words, people need proof that this new way of doing things is better than the way they're used to. That's particularly so when it comes to agentic AI, which he said requires a lot of trust.

"We need to think really quite hard about what does it mean to build trustworthy software," Scott said, adding that not until people trust the software will they hand over control of their devices to an autonomous assistant.

And last, he said that creating a tool with artificial intelligence doesn't automatically make it useful.

"Just because you are using AI to create a lot of activity does not necessarily mean the activity you're creating is valuable," he said, referencing a "meme chat app" he created solely to irritate his children.

We're on the ground in San Francisco

By Corinne Reichert

CNET's Faith Chihil and Corinne Reichert have arrived at Microsoft Build 2026, having collected their badges from the media registration area the night before the keynote kicks off the conference.

Wait, what is Microsoft Build?

By Katelyn Chedraoui

There's no shame in asking the question -- what is Microsoft Build, anyway? The technical answer is that it's Microsoft's annual developer conference, where the tech giant shares updates and other progress reports on its software products. The more interesting answer is that's all we know for sure.

Developer conferences are opportunities for companies to tease new projects, show off experimental tools and introduce us to the next generation of the company. In recent years, Microsoft's Build conferences been all about AI, so we expect to hear a lot about Copilot today.

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