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Microsoft Chairman Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella

Project Zenith brings local 30B AI to Windows, but dense models remain a bottleneck

Microsoft officially named its Windows 11 developer configuration Project Zenith on September 4, 2026, setting a minimum requirement of 64GB of unified memory. Local AI performance varies sharply by model architecture: mixture-of-experts models reach 70–100 tokens per second on AMD Ryzen AI Halo hardware, while dense 70B models manage roughly five. Lenovo's Chinese ownership introduces an additional security consideration.