Microsoft ports DeepSeek’s AI to Copilot+ PCs, and their NPUs

Microsoft has taken the hot new AI model, DeepSeek, and made it available for Copilot+ PCs — and on the NPU, no less.

If it seems like every other week something important is happening in the AI space — well, that’s not too far from the truth. And while it’s sometimes difficult to tell which developments are the most significant, the recent release of Chinese developer DeepSeek’s model has shaken the AI industry deeply, specifically because the cost to train it was, according to the company, much less than other Western models. That sent American stocks plunging, including those involved in the chip and AI industries.

DeepSeek was also in the news for leaking sensitive information, and because the company’s mobile app slurped up user data. But DeepSeek also released its model on GitHub as open source, meaning that others could examine its source code and sanitize it. Microsoft has done just that.

Running DeepSeek isn’t as easy as simply navigating to a website, like Google’s Gemini or Microsoft’s Copilot. Microsoft has released the DeepSeek model to use in the cloud, but it’s DeepSeek for the PC that’s more interesting. Microsoft has “distilled” the DeepSeek model for use on PCs, specifically addressing Copilot+ PCs that use the Qualcomm Snapdragon X platform. (Intel’s Core Ultra 200 chips will be supported later.)

According to a blog post, Microsoft has already released a compact version of DeepSeek, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, with 7-billion and 14-billion-parameter models scheduled to release soon. AI models with smaller parameters are typically less precise but are run more quickly.

But LLMs or AI chatbots typically run on the CPU or GPU, because of the prevalence of both. Microsoft’s use of the NPU is what the logic was designed for: powerful yet efficient AI processing. “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,” Microsoft said.

To see DeepSeek in action on your Copilot+ PC, you’ll need to download Microsoft’s AI Toolkit, then the VS code extension, Microsoft said. You’ll then need to download and install the “deepseek_r1_1_5” model.

Microsoft has quietly worked to bring AI locally to your PC, especially with the ongoing work behind Phi Silica and the promise of AI functions running locally within Windows itself. The DeepSeek port shows that it’s possible.