HP is not sitting this AI PC transition out. With the OmniBook Ultra 16 and OmniBook X 14 now joining the first wave of RTX Spark-powered laptops, the company is making it very clear it wants a front-row seat in whatever comes after the “Copilot+ PC” era.

If you’ve been following laptops over the past couple of years, you’ve probably felt the shift already. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite made ARM laptops feel viable, Apple’s M-series has been quietly setting the bar for efficiency, and Intel and AMD are scrambling to bolt NPUs onto everything. RTX Spark is NVIDIA’s counterpunch: a full-blown Arm-based “superchip” that blends a Grace CPU, a Blackwell-class RTX GPU, and up to 128GB of unified memory into a single platform meant to run AI agents locally instead of constantly phoning home to the cloud. HP hitching the OmniBook branding to this moment is intentional – this is the company’s flagship canvas for what the “AI laptop” is supposed to feel like, not just a spec bump.

HP actually teased this direction early with the OmniBook X 14 based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite, which already leaned hard into battery life and Copilot features. Review units regularly hit well over 15 hours of use and shipped with on-device AI capabilities that made Windows feel a bit more responsive and context-aware. RTX Spark takes that same idea and pushes it further: instead of just accelerating a few Microsoft features, NVIDIA is promising up to 1 petaflop of AI compute, a full RTX GPU stack, and performance that should be able to run heavier local models – think personal agents, generative media tools, and dev workflows – without falling over.

At Computex 2026, HP confirmed that both the OmniBook Ultra 16 and OmniBook X 14 will get RTX Spark configurations later this year. That moves them into a pretty exclusive club of early Spark machines alongside new systems from Dell, ASUS, Lenovo, and MSI, with NVIDIA expecting more than 30 laptops based on the platform by the end of the year. HP is not just participating – it’s already bragging that its refreshed OmniBooks will be among the thinnest laptops to ship with RTX Spark, with the Ultra 16 coming in around 0.62 inches and the X 14 at roughly 0.53 inches. That’s very much a MacBook Air-style pitch: ultra-thin, battery-focused, but now with a serious AI engine and RTX graphics inside.

If you look at how HP has positioned the OmniBook X 14 so far, the story is really about balance. The Snapdragon X Elite version already offers strong multi-core performance, a 14-inch high-res display, and genuinely “all day” battery life, making it an easy recommendation for writers, students, or remote workers who basically live in the browser and Office. The RTX Spark refresh is less about fixing weaknesses and more about giving that same thin-and-light chassis room to breathe on the AI and GPU side. NVIDIA’s platform pairs a 20-core Grace CPU with thousands of Blackwell-based GPU cores and a unified memory pool that can go up to 128GB, which is overkill for email and spreadsheets but a big deal if you’re running local models, editing 4K video, or building AI workflows.

The OmniBook Ultra 16 sits a step up, both literally and figuratively. This is the machine that needs to convince creators, coders, and power users that an ARM-based RTX Spark laptop can replace their chunky Intel or AMD rigs. With a 16-inch panel in a body around 0.62 inches thick, HP is clearly chasing that “desktop replacement without the back pain” slot – something like a more portable XPS 16 competitor, which Dell is also refreshing with Spark. If HP delivers on the promises NVIDIA is making – long battery life, strong GPU performance, and enough AI horsepower to run serious models locally – this Ultra could end up being the template for a lot of creative laptops over the next couple of years.

It’s also worth noting where HP is in the wider Spark ecosystem. NVIDIA says RTX Spark laptops and compact desktops will arrive this fall from HP, Microsoft, Dell, ASUS, Lenovo, and MSI, with Acer and Gigabyte joining later. For HP, that means the OmniBook Ultra 16 and OmniBook X 14 are not niche experiments – they’re part of a first-wave launch across major OEMs in a year NVIDIA is clearly treating as its official entry into the PC processor business. That matters if you’re the type of buyer who’s been burned by one-off platform experiments in the past; Spark will live or die based on broad industry support, and right now HP is very much aligned with NVIDIA and Microsoft’s vision of a “personal agent” PC.

Underneath the marketing gloss, there’s a genuine architectural shift happening that should directly benefit laptops like these. RTX Spark essentially collapses CPU, GPU, and memory into a unified pool, which makes it easier to feed large models and complex workloads without shuffling data back and forth between separate components. NVIDIA is talking about up to 1 petaflop of AI performance and memory bandwidth numbers in the hundreds of gigabytes per second, paired with up to 128GB of unified LPDDR5X. For developers and creators, that means you’re less constrained when experimenting with bigger context windows, higher-res video pipelines, or multi-app workflows, even on a laptop that’s barely thicker than a magazine.

HP, of course, is keeping some cards close to its chest. The company has confirmed that RTX Spark-based OmniBook Ultra 16 and OmniBook X 14 models are “expected to be available later this year,” but it hasn’t shared detailed SKUs, exact configs, or pricing yet, saying that will come closer to launch. What it is saying, very loudly, is that these systems will push for “all-day battery life” and carry the full RTX tech stack, which implies things like DLSS-style upscaling for creative apps, GPU-accelerated encodes, and support for NVIDIA’s own AI software tools layered on top of Windows’ agent features. In other words, these won’t just be thin experiment boards – they’re intended as full-fat RTX laptops in deceptively light shells.

If you zoom out, this move also helps HP diversify its AI PC story beyond a single silicon partner. On one side, you have OmniBook systems built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Intel’s latest Core Ultra and future Panther Lake chips, with Microsoft’s Copilot+ branding front and center. On the new side, you get RTX Spark variants that lean on NVIDIA’s AI stack, Blackwell-class GPUs, and the “personal agent PC” narrative. For buyers, more choice is rarely bad: if you want the absolute best battery life for ultra-mobile work, the Snapdragon X or Intel NPU-based setups might still be enough, but if you want a thin-and-light that can also handle GPU-heavy tasks and local models, waiting for the Spark-powered OmniBook Ultra 16 or OmniBook X 14 makes a lot of sense.

Right now, these RTX Spark OmniBooks are more promise than product, but it’s a promising direction. HP has already proved it can build genuinely portable machines with great endurance in the OmniBook line, and NVIDIA is under real pressure to make Spark a showcase platform that can go toe to toe with Apple’s latest chips and Qualcomm’s Copilot+ surge. If HP can combine its thin-and-light design language with the raw AI and graphics capabilities NVIDIA is putting on the table, the OmniBook Ultra 16 and OmniBook X 14 could end up as some of the most interesting Windows laptops to watch when the first RTX Spark systems finally hit shelves later this year.