(Yahoo! Finance) - CES 2026 is in full swing in Las Vegas. Thousands of attendees have flooded the city's hotels and Las Vegas Convention Center, perusing the various products and devices on display at the tech industry's biggest event of the year.
Like every CES, there is a wide array of gadgets that will eventually land in your living rooms, offices, and driveways. And then there are some that will probably never see the light of day beyond the fluorescent lights of a convention center.
I've been on the ground here for the past few days, running from press conference to press conference, with a stop for coffee along the way, and found three key themes driving the conversation across Sin City: AI, chips, and robots.
In fact, the only place to escape the incredible number of announcements related to those topics was to rush back to my hotel room to pound out this piece. And here we are.
AI everywhere
To say AI has dominated CES 2026 is an understatement. Walk the various show floors, and you'll see AI plastered on virtually everything, with robots walking and crawling to and fro.
From AI TVs and PCs to smartphones and even AI toilets, the tech has been the talk of the conference. Of course, that's to be expected, as generative AI, and physical AI, or robots, continue to draw plenty of investments from the world's biggest tech companies.
Google (GOOG, GOOGL) laid out how the company is bringing its Gemini 3 to its Google TV operating system, allowing you to use natural language to search for content and edit and save images for your TV's screensaver.
Samsung unveiled its Galaxy Z Trifold for the first time in the US, complete with onboard AI capabilities. And you seemingly couldn't throw a rock without hitting some kind of AI-powered wearable, including everything from glasses to rings.
A chip bonanza
The biggest announcements from the show also came from the biggest company at the event: Nvidia (NVDA). CEO Jensen Huang took the stage during the company's Jan. 5 keynote, announcing the launch of its Vera Rubin platform, complete with six new chips, including the Vera CPU, Rubin GPU, and four networking and storage chips.
Huang said Vera Rubin has a 10x improvement in throughput versus the company's Grace Blackwell platform and provides a 10x reduction in token costs.
Tokens in AI models represent things like words, parts of sentences, images, and videos. Models use tokens to break these concepts into more easily processable pieces via tokenization.
The CEO also pointed to the company's large library of open AI models, including its new self-driving car AI model called Alpamayo, which Huang said is designed to help cars eventually be able to understand unique driving situations, like if a child chases a ball into the street.
Not to be outdone, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) CEO Lisa Su held her own keynote at CES, unveiling more information about the company's upcoming Helios rack-scale system for its Instinct MI445X GPU and previewing its next-generation MI500 chips.
Su said Helios is the world's "best AI rack," a direct shot at Nvidia. Both systems will run 72 massive AI chips per rack, making for an interesting matchup for the companies.
AMD similarly revealed its upcoming AI PC chips. Intel (INTC), which is in the midst of a major turnaround effort, broke out its Core Ultra Series 3 AI PC processors, which are up for presale in computers now.
Qualcomm (QCOM) was on hand during CES with its Snapdragon X Plus 2 chip for AI PCs, setting up a three-way fight for consumers' and enterprises' wallets.
Robots marching
In addition to their latest chips, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm revealed more about their individual robotics efforts. Each company has its own chips that currently or will eventually power physical AI systems, such as self-driving cars, robotic arms, and humanoid robots.
Nvidia's setup included a cowboy hat-wearing humanoid bot, a robot simulating surgery, and a helper bot that assisted people with checking in at Nvidia's event.
AMD brought Generative Bionics CEO Daniele Pucci onstage to unveil the company's GENE.01 humanoid robot powered by AMD's processing technologies. Intel had Oversonic Robotics' RoBee humanoid robot on hand to demonstrate how the company is using the chipmaker's Core Ultra 3 processors.
Qualcomm also got in on the robotics action, introducing its Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ10 series chips for robotics and said it's working with robot companies, including Figure, VinMotion, and others, to power humanoid robots.
Hyundai and Boston Dynamics strutted into CES with plans for Hyundai to develop a value chain that will mass-produce robots. The automaker, which owns a majority stake in Boston Dynamics, also said it will begin using the robot company's humanoid Atlas robot in its factories beginning in 2028.
Now, after spending so much time around so much new technology over the past few days, I think I'll disconnect for a bit. So long, Vegas.
By Daniel Howley - Technology Editor
