Microsoft on Monday announced that distilled versions of the DeepSeek-R1 models, the 7 billion and 14 billion parameter variants, will be available on the Copilot+ PCs. The models are available via Azure AI Foundry on Copilot+ PCs powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X, followed by Intel Core Ultra 200V and AMD Ryzen hardware.
“DeepSeek distilled models exemplify how even small pretrained models can shine with enhanced reasoning capabilities and when coupled with the NPUs on Copilot+ PCs, they unlock exciting new opportunities for innovation,” said Microsoft in the announcement.
Microsoft Copilot+ PCs are devices capable of running AI models offline, as they’re equipped with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU). An NPU is a dedicated unit on an SoC (System on Chip) that performs all the calculations for AI-related tasks, and leaves CPUs and GPUs to handle other workloads.
For manufacturers to ship Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft states a minimum of 16 GB of memory, 256GB SSD and an NPU capable of processing at least 40 TOPS, or trillion operations per second.
Users can access all the available variants of the DeepSeek models by downloading the AI Toolkit VS Code extension. Microsoft also said that the DeepSeek-R1 14B model outputs 8 tokens per second, and aims to further optimise the performance.
Last month, Microsoft also announced the availability of NPU optimised version of the DeepSeek-R1 1.5B distilled model on the Copilot+ PCs.
Manufacturers like HP, Dell, Asus, Acer, and Lenovo are building AI PCs with Microsoft Copilot+ capabilities. Recently, a report from Canalys revealed that AI capable PC shipments reached 15.4 million in Q4 2024.
“For the full year 2024, 17% of PCs shipped were AI-capable, with the biggest winners being Apple at 54% share, followed by Lenovo and HP at 12% share each,” read the report.
The research firm also added that Windows AI PC shipments grew 26% accounting for 15% of all Windows PCs shipped in Q4 2024.
The enterprise sector is expected to be a major driver of AI PC adoption. A report from Gartner suggests that AI PCs will occupy 100% of the enterprise market by 2026. Moreover, the end of support for Windows 10 PCs in October 2025 will likely drive the adoption of newer, more capable AI PCs.
