Microsoft has announced that it is bringing NPU-optimized versions of DeepSeek R1 directly to Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs soon, allowing developers to build AI-powered apps that run on device using the wildly popular AI model.
In the announcement, Microsoft states DeepSeek R1 models will be coming to Qualcomm Snapdragon X-equipped PCs first, followed by computers with Intel Core Ultra 200V (Lunar Lake) CPUs and more down the line. Distilled DeepSeek R1 7B and 14B variants will be available via AI Toolkit, and it aims to take "full advantage" of Copilot+ PC NPUs.
This is aimed at developers to utilize DeepSeek R1 to "experiment with models," getting them ready for deployment. Once it arrives, users can find it in the AI Toolkit VS Code extension and download the AI model locally on a Copilot+ PC.
As Microsoft notes, the company has taken what it's learned from Phi Silica — a small language model (SLM) for Windows 11 — with minimizing battery life consumption and PC resources and applied it with the DeepSeek models.
"The optimized DeepSeek models for the NPU take advantage of several of the key learnings and techniques from that effort, including how we separate out the various parts of the model to drive the best tradeoffs between performance and efficiency, low bit rate quantization and mapping transformers to the NPU," Microsoft states.
Microsoft continues: "Additionally, we take advantage of Windows Copilot Runtime (WCR) to scale across the diverse Windows ecosystem with ONNX QDQ format."
Essentially, this translates to seeing DeepSeek AI-optimized apps locally on Copilot+ PCs. As per requirements, these Windows 11 devices will need to be powered by a neural processing unit (NPU) with at least 40 TOPS (trillion operations per second), 16GB of DDR5 RAM and 256GB for storage.
This is the standard for many PCs housing Snapdragon X Elite, X Plus and the recently announced Snapdragon X PCs, like the Dell XPS 13.
Microsoft is being very fast to jump onboard the DeepSeek bandwagon, with the Chinese Ai startup making waves last week. The news comes despite fears of DeepSeek AI collecting your keystrokes and huge amounts of data, along with accusations of DeepSeek copying ChatGPT. Microsoft is deploying a local model of DeepSeek R1, but this still seems quite sudden.
We'll see how Microsoft utilizes the AI model on its Copilot+ PCs soon enough. In the meantime, check out the latest DeepSeek updates.
More from Tom's Guide
- It doesn't matter if DeepSeek copied OpenAI — the damage has already been done in the AI arms race
- What is DeepSeek? — everything to know
- I tested ChatGPT vs DeepSeek with 7 prompts — here’s the surprising winner
