Susana Schwartz
CES wraps up, but its impact will linger
CES 2026 is ending today, and Sean Kinney, RCR Tech principal analyst wrote a summary of the top AI news from the show, with each section written at a different pub off the Las Vegas monorail, combining his love of tech, public transport, and cocktails. My summary of his summary follows, below, but for a deep dive into his favorite Las Vegas bars and favorite AI and tech news, go here.
– Nvidia: CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote highlighted the new Vera Rubin platform, with his comments about Rubin AI chips “needing less intensive cooling” sending cooling system stocks tumbling on Wednesday. Huang also touched on AI scaling laws, manufacturing intelligence, agentic AI, and physical AI.
– Intel: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors built on its 18A node at a fabrication facility in Arizona reflected a trend of a “made in America” narrative that was increasingly popular, as well as a theme of moving from consumer devices to platforms.
– Qualcomm: AI without the cloud is shifting focus from mobile to PCs, automotive, wearables, extended reality, data center and even robotics. Its new SoC platforms for general-purpose robotics and its Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ10 Series was showcased as a premium-tier robotics processor purpose-built for humanoid robots and autonomous mobile robots.
– AMD: With a CES tagline of “AI everywhere, for everyone,” AMD’s story is one of convergence, AMD CPUs, GPUs, and accelerators. Its Helios rack-scale platform “for yotta-scale AI infrastructure”, is built on AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs and AMD EPYC Venice CPUs. The company also introduced its Ryzen AI platforms for AI PCs and embedded applications alongside the Ryzen AI Halo developer platform.
These and other announcements at CES represent a shift in focus. CES is no longer a consumer electronics show, but rather, as Sean puts it, a “consumer reality-setting” show that defines the contours of AI capability and economics, with movement “down the stack” and a recognition that the consumer experience is essentially a property of infrastructure and industrial design.
Susana Schwartz
Technology Editor
RCRTech
AI Infrastructure Top Stories
CES wraps up: The big news was Nvidia’s presence at the traditionally consumer-facing show, but it’s indicative of a bigger trend, that consumer experience is increasingly a property of platforms and infrastructure. Here is an in-depth summary.
Build or rent AI hardware?: Every organization building with AI eventually has to decide the level of control it wants, which is based on cost, data security, talent pipeline, hardware obsolescence, and the unpredictable nature of AI workloads.
Open-source chips: Will RISC-V help democratize the AI industry? This open instruction set architecture provides a foundation for custom chip design without the licensing fees that have defined the semiconductor industry for decades.
GlobalData 2026 Enterprise Predictions: New report predicts global pipeline of large-scale data center projects will have a total value of $2,306 billion, “with some geographies risking overcapacity,” GlobalData’s Beatriz Valle told RCR Wireless.
AI Today: What You Need to Know
Meta’s 3 nuclear power deals: Meta has signed with TerraPower, Oklo and Vistra to support its Prometheus AI data centers in New Albany, Ohio. The 1 GW cluster will span multiple data center buildings.
Cooling becomes core requirement: According to a new report from Dell’Oro Group, the global Data Center Liquid Cooling market is set to reach approximately $7 billion in manufacturer revenue by 2029.
TSMC posts strong Q4: TSMC closed the year with stronger-than-expected revenue for Q4, with a 20% YOY jump to about $33.1 billion (NT$1.046 trillion), showing global demand for AI-related chips continues to be strong.
China investigates Meta’s Manus deal: Chinese regulators at the Ministry of Commerce said they’d examine whether Meta’s acquisition of Manus, a Singapore start-up with Chinese roots, complies with China’s export and investment rules.
