What does an NPU do and why do so many laptops have them?

NPUs, or Neural Processing Units, are now common in mid-range and premium laptops because manufacturers need them to meet Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC requirements and support Windows AI features. They can run certain AI tasks using far less power than a CPU or GPU, which could help laptops handle features such as webcam effects without excessive heat or battery drain.

Their practical uses remain limited: examples include noise suppression, live captions, translation and some local search functions. Microsoft’s certification requires an NPU capable of 40 TOPS, alongside at least 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage; recent chips from Qualcomm, Intel and AMD exceed that threshold. NPUs are designed to run trained models, not train them, and large local AI models still need a powerful GPU, while cloud services such as ChatGPT do not rely on a laptop’s NPU.