A KRW 5.8 Million AI Laptop: Nvidia's RTX Spark Lands in Korea
A laptop built to run AI on the machine itself, with no cloud meter ticking, made its Korean debut at COEX. Nvidia's RTX Spark notebooks went on sale on Oct. 16, and the cheapest model costs KRW 5,799,000.
The 'AI PC' arrives at COEX
Nvidia held the RTX Spark launch event at COEX in Samseong-dong on Oct. 16. Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI are shipping notebooks with the chip.
It is a Windows PC chip that puts CPU and GPU in one package. Nvidia first unveiled it at Computex in June; Korean sales followed about four months later.
The spec that matters: memory
A 20-core Grace CPU and a Blackwell GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores share up to 128GB of memory. AI throughput is 1 petaflops at FP4.
Nvidia says that design lets 70B-class open AI models and agents run directly on the laptop.
Why is it so pricey?
The cheapest in Korea is the MSI Prestige N16 at KRW 5,799,000. The US starting price is $2,599 (about KRW 3.46 million), and top models climb into the KRW 9 million range.
An Nvidia official admitted that 128GB looked affordable at the design stage, but "we did not expect memory prices to rise this much."
The 'no token anxiety' pitch
Nvidia VP Keita Ida pitched on-device AI with no limit on token usage. Sensitive data stays on the machine; heavy jobs go to the cloud.
The company also says creative apps such as Photoshop and Premiere finish jobs faster.
Before you buy
Laptops are sold through each maker's official site and major retailers. Samsung and LG were not on the first list; Inews24 reports talks are said to be under way.
Price and how well existing software runs on Arm are the hurdles. More models at different price points are expected from next year.