Microsoft Build 2026: AI, Developers, and Potential New Hardware

With Google I/O 2026 in the books, it's now Microsoft's turn to delight (or terrorize) the public with new AI features. Microsoft's Build 2026 developer conference starts Tuesday, June 2 at 12:30PM ET / 9:30PM PT with a keynote from CEO Satya Nadella. You can watch the keynote live via the Youtube stream embedded in this article or follow along with Engadget's liveblog as we react and recap the event as it happens. For even more information, Microsoft says it'll also be updating its own blog with details of what it announces as Build goes on.

Microsoft's yearly conference tends to be drier than the ones held by its competitors Google and Apple because it's geared towards developers. Nadella's keynote is supposed to focus on the opportunities the company is creating for that community in this "era of AI," an idea that might not mean the same thing in 2026 that it did in 2025. Microsoft has publicly acknowledged a growing backlash to Windows 11 and it's been adjusting some of its AI strategy accordingly. The company and OpenAI have transitioned into a more open partnership as of April 2026, and Microsoft has both redesigned the enterprise version of Copilot and removed the AI assistant from some apps. Agentic AI will undoubtedly still be part of Microsoft's pitch, but the models the company uses and where its features are available could look very different.

Build might also be an opportunity to unveil new hardware. NVIDIA is rumored to be working on its own Arm chips to rival the likes of Qualcomm, and Microsoft seems like it could be a possible partner. Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's Executive Vice President of Windows and Devices, recently teased that the company would have "something new for developers" at Build, alongside an image of the rounded corner of some new piece of hardware. Separately, both the NVIDIA and official Windows accounts posted the coordinates of Computex, a trade show in Taiwan that starts the same day as Build, with the phrase "a new era of PC." That's not quite a smoking gun, but clearly something is up.