CES 2026 is officially underway in Las Vegas, and if the first two days of press conferences tell us anything, AI has completely consumed the tech industry's hardware strategy. Nvidia kicked things off with its new Rubin computing architecture and autonomous vehicle models, while AMD and Amazon made aggressive pushes to bring generative AI to consumer PCs and smart home devices. This isn't just another product cycle. It's a fundamental shift in how every major tech company builds and sells hardware.
Las Vegas is packed with the usual CES chaos right now, but there's a clarity to the messaging that wasn't there before. Every major hardware company is essentially asking the same question: how do we make AI useful on the device people are actually holding, not just in the cloud?
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang opened Monday with the kind of presentation that's become his signature—part victory lap, part technical deep dive. The company spent two years turning its GPUs into the default computing backbone for AI training and inference. Now it's moving to the next phase. Rubin, the new architecture rolling out in the second half of 2026, brings significant speed and storage upgrades over the current Blackwell generation. But more importantly, it signals Nvidia's commitment to staying ahead of an increasingly competitive chip market where AMD, Google, and others are designing custom silicon for AI workloads.
What caught more attention than raw specs was Nvidia's push into embodied AI. The company showed off its Alpamayo family of open-source models built specifically for autonomous vehicles, framing itself as infrastructure that roboticists and automakers can build on. That mirrors a broader strategy: positioning Nvidia as Android for robots, providing the software layer that lets companies focus on hardware and applications rather than training foundational AI models from scratch.