Project Zenith comes to AMD Ryzen AI Halo: a preconfigured environment under Windows 11 for development with local AI

Microsoft and AMD have announced the official availability of Project Zenith on the platform AMD Ryzen AI Halo. Initially presented during the last IFA 2026, this platform seeks to offer an installation of a Windows 11 fully ready to program directly with artificial intelligencesaving developers the process of installing and configuring the operating system and tools to start working.

Project CZenith debuts on Ryzen AI Halo computers equipped with the new processor AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495, although it will arrive later to the rest of the Ryzen AI Max family devices. For those who already have one of these computers, Microsoft has also published the configuration repository on GitHub to install the environment manually.

Project Zenith integrates different development utilities into Windows 11 as standard. Includes Visual Studio Code, Git, GitHub CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, Azure CLI, Python, Node.js, .NET, PowerShell 7, and Linux Subsystem (WSL) already pre-installed and configured, in addition to settings of the operating system itself optimized for programming environments.

For its part, AMD adds its own software layer through the AMD Ryzen AI Developer Centerwhich includes the “AMD AI Playbook” guides. With, for example, ready-made configurations to run language models (LLM) using PyTorch and software AMD ROCmimage generation with ComfyUIAI assisted programming with Qwen3-Coder in VS Codedeployment of local models with LM Studio and automations with n8n.

At the hardware level, Ryzen AI Halo systems offer up to 192 GB of unified memory (with up to 160 GB assignable to the integrated GPU for AI) and a 273 GB/s memory bandwidth. This hardware allows you to load large language models from up to 300 billion parameters (300B) without depending on cloud services, also maintaining native compatibility with the x86 ecosystem unlike ARM-based equipment.