Microsoft has announced that it will be bringing “NPU-optimized” versions of the DeepSeek-R1 AI model to Copilot+ PCs soon, first with Snapdragon X devices, followed by PCs with Intel Lunar Lake and AMD Ryzen AI 9 processors. The first release will be the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B model, and will be available via the Microsoft AI Toolkit for developers. 7B and 14B variants will arrive later.
Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs are devices that are equipped with at least 256GB storage, 16GB RAM, and an NPU that can output a minimum of 40 TOPS of power. This means some older NPU-equipped PCs won't be able to run these models locally.
"These optimized models let developers build and deploy AI-powered applications that run efficiently on-device, taking full advantage of the powerful NPUs in Copilot+ PCs” says a Microsoft blog post announcing DeepSeek R1 support. “With our work on Phi Silica, we were able to harness highly efficient inferencing – delivering very competitive time to first token and throughput rates, while minimally impacting battery life and consumption of PC resources … Additionally, we take advantage of Windows Copilot Runtime (WCR) to scale across the diverse Windows ecosystem with ONNX QDQ format.”
In the blog post, Microsoft highlights how it worked to ensure the R1 models could run locally on NPU-based hardware. “First, we leverage a sliding window design that unlocks super-fast time to first token and long context support despite not having dynamic tensor support in the hardware stack. Second, we use the 4-bit QuaRot quantization scheme to truly take advantage of low bit processing.”
Microsoft says the 1.5B Distilled R1 model will be available soon, and that it will be accessible via the AI Toolkit extension in VS Code. Developers can use Playground to experiment with DeepSeek R1 locally on compatible Copilot+ PCs. In addition to supporting DeepSeek R1 locally, Microsoft is also making these AI models available in the cloud via Azure AI Foundry. “As part of Azure AI Foundry, DeepSeek R1 is accessible on a trusted, scalable, and enterprise-ready platform, enabling businesses to seamlessly integrate advanced AI while meeting SLAs, security, and responsible AI commitments—all backed by Microsoft’s reliability and innovation.”
Microsoft has moved fast to support DeepSeek R1, even as US tech firms panic over its existence. OpenAI now claims that DeepSeek has stolen proprietary code to develop their AI model, which cost less than $10 million to develop. This stands in stark contrast to the AI models developed by US firms, which has cost billions so far.
