Jensen Huang Shakes Up CES Again: Innovators Battle for AI Supremacy [Preview of CES]

Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, is seen interacting with citizens at the 25th anniversary event of NVIDIA's GeForce graphics card (GPU) launch in Korea, held on the evening of October 30 at COEX in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. 2025.10.30 Photo by Jo Yongjun

As the world's largest home appliance and IT exhibition, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026, approaches, global tech giants such as NVIDIA, AMD, Lenovo, and Siemens are gearing up for an intense competition of visions to lead the era of artificial intelligence (AI). CES has now expanded beyond the domain of home appliance companies. Both AI companies and traditional corporations seeking to transform through AI use this stage to announce their reinventions. Under the theme "Where Innovators Come," CES 2026 is expected to go beyond being a showcase of new technologies, becoming a "real-world stage" that demonstrates how AI, when combined with the physical world, can fundamentally transform industries and daily life.

◆ "As Expected, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA"… The highlight of this year's event is undoubtedly the appearance of Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA. On January 5, one day before the official opening, Huang will deliver a special live keynote, effectively kicking off CES 2026. Although his event is not part of the official CES program, it attracts more attention than any other event and is scheduled even before the official opening keynote. Following his appearance at CES 2025, Jensen Huang is once again at the center of the event in 2026, reshaping the flow of the show around himself.

At CES 2025, Jensen Huang unveiled a consumer GPU and introduced the concept of "Physical AI," where robots interact with the real world, opening a new frontier in robotics and autonomous driving. The AI industry expects that this year, he will go beyond the evolution of Physical AI to present a concrete blueprint for "Agentic AI," where AI independently judges and acts, along with a next-generation graphics processing unit (GPU) roadmap. There is also speculation that he will unveil a new PC platform that combines GPU and CPU. At the 2025 event, Jensen Huang drew significant attention by criticizing quantum computers.

At this year's event, NVIDIA will collaborate with the newly introduced "Foundry" exhibition at CES, demonstrating technologies applied to various fields such as next-generation AI chips, robotics, autonomous driving, and healthcare. There is particular interest in potential collaborations with Korean companies such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which are key partners in the AI semiconductor supply chain, especially for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), as well as whether Jensen Huang will visit their booths. Meetings with the heads of Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motor, and SK Hynix are also anticipated. The keywords Jensen Huang mentions are expected to have significant implications for the Korean semiconductor industry. At the 2025 event, he stated,

"Samsung Electronics needs to redesign its DRAM."

CE S 2026 Official Keynote Speakers. From left to right: Roland Busch, CEO of Siemens; Joe Creed, CEO of Caterpillar; Lisa Su, CEO of AMD; Yang Yuanqing, CEO of Lenovo.

◆"Conquering the Sphere"… Chinese company Lenovo is also making bold moves. Although Lenovo is a Chinese company, it has become a global player after acquiring IBM's PC business in the United States. Yang Yuanqing, Chairman and CEO of Lenovo, will deliver a keynote at the "Sphere," a landmark venue in Las Vegas. This is the first time a tech company has rented out the entire Sphere for a CES keynote. In 2025, Delta Air Lines was the first to do so. Lenovo's keynote at the Sphere is seen as an attempt to visually showcase the AI era.

Yang will present Lenovo's hybrid AI vision, spanning from data centers to edge devices, under the theme "Smarter AI for All." According to the company, Lenovo's collaboration to enhance the performance of the new "F1" race cars, which have become a new attraction in Las Vegas, will also be introduced. By leveraging the Sphere's overwhelming immersive screens, Lenovo is expected to dramatically demonstrate how AI, through data centers, can revolutionize industries and redefine the future of computing environments.

◆ Lisa Su, Roland Busch, and Other Tech Leaders in an "AI Showdown" = Moves to counter NVIDIA's AI dominance are also emerging. Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, will deliver the official opening keynote at CES 2026, presenting AMD's unique AI solutions and next-generation processor strategies to compete with NVIDIA, while sharing innovations in high-performance computing (HPC) and AI-based applications.

Roland Busch, CEO of Siemens in Germany, will also take the keynote stage. He plans to demonstrate how traditional industries such as manufacturing and mobility are being digitally transformed through the combination of AI and the industrial metaverse. This suggests that AI is no longer confined to the realm of software but is deeply penetrating real-world environments such as manufacturing sites.

Traditional construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar is also expected to declare its transformation into an AI company at this CES. Joe Creed, CEO of Caterpillar, will explain how the company, whose brand is synonymous with excavators, plans to lead the era of smart infrastructure.

The Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the organizer of CES, has predicted that this event will be "a turning point where AI technology evolves from the laboratory into a tool that solves humanity's grand challenges."