No Windows 12 at Build, but Microsoft has something else up its sleeve

Ahead of Microsoft Build 2026, which begins tomorrow, Microsoft has officially stated that it will not be unveiling Windows 12.

For months now, rumors have been circulating that Microsoft might soon unveil a successor to Windows 11, fittingly called Windows 12. Some observers had expected such an announcement at the Microsoft Build 2026 developer conference. And according to Windows Latest, a social media campaign further fueled this speculation, as it spoke of a looming disruption in the computer industry.

However, Pavan Davuluri, President of Microsoft’s Windows + Devices division, made clear via a social media post that Microsoft will not be unveiling a new operating system at Build 2026: “Something new is coming for developers. And no, it’s not a new OS version 😅. See you at Build next week!”

This should take speculations of Windows 12 off the table, at least for the time being. Instead, according to Windows Latest, Microsoft wants to forge a new alliance to bring high-performance gaming and local AI to the Arm architecture.

Microsoft recently made grand claims about a “new era of the PC,” and Nvidia, Arm, and MediaTek joined in with the exact same wording. To this end, the coordinates of the Taipei Music Center, where Nvidia’s Computex keynote took place, have been published.

The Nvidia N1X is a brand-new Arm processor developed by Nvidia in collaboration with MediaTek. You can learn more about why N1X is big news for laptops and how Nvidia’s RTX Spark is going to shake things up, but in this case, Nvidia’s new N1X chip will be installed in the new Surface Laptop Ultra, which is said to be suitable as a full-fledged gaming platform for the first time. Microsoft writes:

Surface Laptop Ultra is our first laptop to combine a powerful NVIDIA Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 128GB of unified memory and full CUDA support. Unified memory allows the pool of RAM to be dynamically allocated wherever your workloads need it most across CPU and GPU, so AI creation, 3D rendering and multi-model workflows run simultaneously, with 1 petaflop of AI compute, capable of running up to 120B parameter models locally. No walls. No compromises.

We’ll find out more at Microsoft Build over the next few days. For everyday Windows users, however, only one thing really matters for now: we won’t be seeing Windows 12 this week.