CES 2026 – Day 0 – C is for Consumer

Little attention is paid to the consumer at its own show

Jensen sets the tone.

• Jensen’s command of the airwaves is now so strong that wherever he has a keynote, he gives Nvidia the power to determine what the main theme of the event will be, even at a show as big as CES.
• With 3,000 in the auditorium, hundreds more in overflow rooms and thousands online, Nvidia has determined that the main theme of CES 2026 will be robotics, even though this is far from being a theme that is relevant to the consumer.
• Within this, Nvidia is also highlighting autonomous driving, where it has launched an end-to-end model called Alpamayo, which is being made available to open source, with both the model weights and the data that was used to train it being available.
• Alpamayo is a vision, language action (VLA) model that brings the “reasoning” techniques used to improve LLM performance to autonomous driving.
• This has the advantage of outputting its reasoning steps (like Gemini and ChatGPT) such that the actions that the vehicle takes are explainable, which has been a major issue in end-to-end autonomous driving models for many years.
• Despite this improvement, I still do not think that an end-to-end model where sensor data goes in one end, and driving instructions pop out of the other will ever produce a commercially viable, fully hands-off autonomous driving solution.
• Hence, while this will be able deliver advanced driver assistance products, I think that the answer to the autonomous driving solution will be in a more nuanced and structured solution.
• Nvidia also highlighted the extension of its partnership with Siemens, where Siemens will integrate CUDA-X and Omniverse into some of its design and digital twin tools.
• This is important as it is another step by Nvidia to ensure that it is selected as a silicon supplier for Industrial AI where its grip on the ecosystem is not nearly as strong as it is in the data centre.

AMD – A nod to the consumer

• AMD mostly followed Nvidia in ignoring the consumer, but did launch a couple of new products for PCs, which just about allowed it to keep a straight face when opening the world’s biggest consumer electronics trade show.
• AMD provided an extensive run-through of AI-related market segments, for once taking more time than Nvidia to get its message across.
• AMD also invited a pretty good slate of guests from OpenAI to Blue Origin onto the stage to talk about their industries, and, of course, to extol their partnership with AMD.
• The most important of these was OpenAI as the $60bn deal that OpenAI has signed with AMD gives it a level of market credibility that it has not previously been able to conjure.
• This will encourage developers to increasingly use its software platform, which in turn will give it more traction, which attracts more developers and so on.
• This has greatly increased the company’s visibility and credibility in AI, which is, I suspect, how it was able to attract such a diverse and strong slate of guests to join Lisa on stage.
• 2026 looks like it will be a breakout year from AMD in AI, but this is already more than priced into the shares.

Consumer AI– Samsung and Google.

• The deepening co-operation between Google and Samsung is beginning to bear more fruit with Samsung expecting to double the number of devices with “Galaxy AI” in them from 400m to 800m by the end of 2026.
• Galaxy AI is basically Google’s AI with a light rebranding by Samsung which I take to be a positive development.
• Samsung’s ability to develop cutting-edge AI is pretty awful, as the execrable Bixby has long demonstrated, while Google’s attempts to be relevant in hardware have gone nowhere and cost billions of dollars of shareholder value.
• Hence, it has always made much more sense for the two companies to work more closely together rather than going it alone, and this is yet another sign of a deepening partnership.
• This is a real problem for OpenAI, which must win the consumer AI ecosystem battle as it does not yet have Google or Samsung’s reach into the devices, apps and services where users live their digital lives.
• Aside from Nvidia’s command of the airwaves, this is likely to be a major theme of the show and Samsung and Google will be looking to push this across as many device categories as they can.