CES 2026 opened in Las Vegas with AI dominating corporate messaging for the third consecutive year. From Nvidia’s Rubin architecture rollout to AMD’s personal AI expansion, Boston Dynamics’ Google partnership, and Razer’s quirky AI companions, the show floor blended frontier computing announcements with the hardware oddities that define the annual event.
Jensen Huang unveiled Rubin computing architecture replacing Blackwell in H2 2026, designed for AI’s escalating computation demands. The Alpamayo family of open-source autonomous vehicle AI models positions NVIDIA as “Android for generalist robots”—a platform play that could define the next decade of physical AI.
AMD’s Ryzen AI 400 Series
Lisa Su’s keynote featured OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Fei-Fei Li, and Luma AI’s Amit Jain. The focus on expanding personal AI capabilities signals AMD’s bet that edge AI will be as transformational as cloud AI.
Boston Dynamics × Google
The partnership brings Google’s Gemini foundation models to Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid robot, combining world-class robotics hardware with frontier AI capabilities. This represents the vertical integration trend playing out in physical AI.
The Strategic Picture
Three years into the AI era, CES reveals an industry that has moved beyond chatbots into physical form. The announcements share a common thread: AI is leaving screens and entering the real world.
The infrastructure layer (NVIDIA, AMD) continues to dominate value capture, while application layer companies race to build defensible positions in specific verticals—from robotaxis to companion robots to industrial automation.
What This Means
CES 2026 signals that AI’s next phase will be physical. The companies building the compute infrastructure, the robotics platforms, and the scale advantages in physical AI will define the next wave of technology value creation.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
