Microsoft is moving aggressively to make artificial intelligence a central selling point of Windows as it winds down support for Windows 10. The company said it will end mainstream security updates for Windows 10 on Oct. 14, 2025, and is encouraging consumers and businesses to migrate to Windows 11, which is receiving a new wave of AI features tied to cloud services and model integrations.

Microsoft said in a blog post that customers who cannot migrate immediately can purchase extended security support through October 2026, while some users — including those in the European Union and U.S. customers who synchronize their devices with Microsoft’s cloud — will receive extended protections at no extra charge. The company framed the policy as a balance between maintaining security and accelerating adoption of newer capabilities.

The AI enhancements arriving for Windows 11 expand the system’s “Copilot” integrations and add context-aware suggestions in apps and the operating system itself, tapping models hosted in the cloud for tasks such as summarizing documents, generating drafts and automating routine workflows. Microsoft has tied those capabilities to partnerships with OpenAI and hardware vendors, saying the combination will allow more responsive, multimodal assistance across devices.

The industry infrastructure underpinning those innovations is also shifting. Nvidia announced a plan to invest $100 billion in OpenAI, a move the chipmaker described as intended to expand the computing capacity needed to train and run large language models like ChatGPT. Nvidia’s investment underscores how the rollout of AI features on consumer platforms depends on a vast and expensive data-center ecosystem powered by specialized accelerators.

For everyday users and IT managers, the twin developments present both opportunity and friction. Windows 11’s AI tools promise productivity gains by automating repetitive tasks and surfacing relevant information, and tighter integration with cloud models can enable capabilities that would be infeasible on-device. But security experts and privacy advocates have cautioned that increased cloud reliance can amplify data flows to third parties and create new vectors for vulnerability if policies and controls do not keep pace.

Smaller businesses and consumers face another pressure point: the cost of migration. Microsoft’s extended security offer is intended to buy time, but paying for extra support or investing in new hardware to take full advantage of AI features may be beyond the resources of many users. European regulators have emphasized data sovereignty and consumer protections in recent inquiries into AI, and those debates are likely to intensify as core desktop operating systems become conduits for generative models.

Microsoft argued that the transition will improve long-term security and user experience while enabling new AI-driven workflows. Nvidia and OpenAI’s expanding compute partnership, meanwhile, signals a consolidation of the infrastructure necessary to scale these models widely. Together, the moves highlight a turning point: the PC is becoming less a standalone platform than an interface into cloud-scale intelligence — a change that promises capabilities but also forces public and private actors to confront costs, privacy and fairness as foundational policy questions.