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That’s a wrap on AMD
Well the AMD keynote was filled with product launches and a ton of guests!
A quick recount. OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman, World Labs co-founder Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Absci CEO Sean McClain, CEO and co-founder of Generative Bionics Daniele Pucci, John Couluris of Blue Origin, and Michael Kratsios, the national science and technology advisor to the Trummp Administration, were just a few who joined AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su on stage during her keynote at CES.
Oh and she ended the night by handing out $20,000 education grants to several students who were part of the top teams in an AMD sponsored hack-a-thon with Hack Club.
The repeated message from Su over her two-hour keynote centered on how reliant AI is on compute, whether it is to develop advances in healthcare, space, robotics, world models, training models, AI assistants, or even national dominance.
That is it for me as well tonight. We’ll be back with more from CES tomorrow.
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World Labs co-founder Fei-Fei Li shows off Marble
Dr. Fei-Fei Li, co-founder and CEO of World Labs and arguably one of the most influential researchers in AI, was another guest during AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su’s keynote during CES.
The conversation touched on all the promises of AI, especially when it comes to creating worlds. Li showed off the capability of her company’s first product Marble, which uses generative 3D world models to create bring spatial intelligence to life. World Labs is backed by AMD’s venture arm.
Li demonstrated how Marble was able to quickly create a 3D world that still obeys the laws of physics. Marble can be used to create imaginary worlds or using photos of say a Vegas recreate it in a digital 3D model.
“What you don’t see here behind the scene is how much computation and why inference speed really matters,” Li said. The faster we can run these models, the more responsive the world becomes. Instant camera moves, instant edits and a scene that stays coherent as you actually navigate and explore and that’s what’s really important.”
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AMD’s bet on AI-powered personal computers
AMD is on a roll with announcements and that includes a new line of AI processors as the company thinks AI-powered personal computers are the way of the future.
AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su revealed while on stage the AMD Ryzen AI 400 Series processor, the company’s latest version of its AI-powered PC chips. This latest version of the Ryzen processor series allows for 1.3x faster multitasking than its competitors and are 1.7x times faster at content creation, according to AMD.
Read the full story here.
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OpenAI’s Brockman says GDP growth may soon be tied to compute
OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman talked a lot about his desire for more compute while onstage with AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su.
As I noted a moment ago, he really wants more compute. And apparently that desire is shared across the company.
“Every time we want to release a new feature, want to produce a new model, we want to bring this technology to the world, we have a big fight internally over compute because there are so many things we want to launch and produce for all of you that we simply cannot, because we are compute constrained,” he said.
Now here is when Brockman made an interesting prediction. He noted that we are moving to a world where GDP growth will be driven by the amount of compute that is available in a particular country, in a particular region. “I think that we’re starting to see the first inklings of this,” he said without providing an example. “And I think over the next couple of years we’ll see it start to hit in a real way.”
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OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman just wants more compute
I promised that AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su’s keynote at CES would have some high-profile visitors. And look, here is OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman.
Brockman talked a lot about the power and promise of ChatGPT. The pair also joked about how he just wants more compute.
“Now, I would say, I think every single time I see you, you tell me you need more compute,” Su said. “It’s true. It’s true,” Brockman responded.
Compute is one of the key bottlenecks that Brockman sees for AI adoption.
“The world is going to require far more compute than we have right now,” he said. “Like, I would love to have a GPU running in the background for every single person in the world, because I think it can deliver value for them, but that’s billions of GPUs. No one has a plan to build that kind of scale.”
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AMD’s Helios rack weighs the same as two compact cars
So AI is for everyone, but as AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su also noted is that we don’t have nearly enough compute for everything that we can possibly do.
So what’s next? AMD is in the business of building compute and Su’s keynote promises to reveal lots of new products, high-profile execs, and a bit of education. Case in point, Su noted that bringing AI infrastructure to scale requires as well as some more than just raw performance. And her answer was compute CPUs, GPUs, networking, coming together. And of course an open modular rack design like Helios, which was revealed in 2025 and also shown on stage Monday at CES.
“Helios is a monster of a rack,” Su said. “This is no regular rack, okay. This is a double wide design based on the OCP open rack wide standard developed in collaboration with Meta, and it weighs nearly 7,000 pounds.” She then added, “We wanted to show you what is really power in all this AI, it is actually more than two compact cars.”
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AMD CEO: AI is for everyone
AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su is the first official CES keynote and it’s all about — you guessed it — AI.
“AI is the most important technology of the last 50 years, and I can say it’s absolutely our number one priority at AMD,” she said Monday evening. “It’s already touching every major industry, whether you’re going to talk about health care or science or manufacturing or commerce, and we’re just scratching the surface, AI is going to be everywhere over the next few years. And most importantly, AI is for everyone.”
To give you a sense of how the world is using AI, Su shared this stat. Since the launch of ChatGPT a few years ago, “we’ve gone from a million people using AI to now more than a billion active users.”
She added: “This is just an incredible ramp. It looked it took the internet decades to reach that same milestone. Now what we are projecting is even more amazing. We see the adoption of AI growing to over 5 billion active users.”
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First look: the Lucid-Nuro-Uber robotaxi
We’ve known for a while that Uber, Lucid, and Nuro are collaborating on a robotaxi, but the three companies just revealed the production-intent version here at the show — and I got a sneak peek before the official unveiling. It’s built around the Lucid Gravity, which feels like a really wise choice. It’s overwhelmingly spacious inside and makes a ton of sense for a premium robotaxi service.
I also got a glimpse of what the rider UI will look like. It’s quite similar to Waymo’s in-car UI, though Uber says it is developing this software itself. All said, I could see this becoming a popular option in the Bay Area when the three companies start offering rides later this year, especially for folks who want more leg room than Waymo’s Jaguar I-Pace affords.
We’ve also been trying to figure out a portmanteau for this collaboration and would love to hear your thoughts. Nubercid? Lubero? Read the full story here.
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Cute robots always steal the show
Speaking of robotics, the Nvidia keynote might be over but we’d be remiss not to mention the cute robots onstage.
Amid conversations about advances in robotics and automation, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang got friendly with two very cute R2D2-like bots on Monday. The bots, which made their second appearance on an Nvidia stage, helped illustrate where the company is hoping to take robotics with its software models and hardware.
Huang has previously said he believes humanoid robotics could become a multi-trillion-dollar industry. The bots were cute but maybe not built for speed. “Hurry up,” he said as they waddled slowly across the stage.
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Nvidia wants to be the default platform for generalist robotics
Nvidia released a new stack of robot foundation models, simulation tools, and edge hardware at CES 2026. And as senior AI reporter Rebecca Bellan notes, the move signals the company’s ambition to become the default platform for generalistrobotics, much like Android became the operating system for smartphones.
Nvidia revealed details on Monday about its full-stack ecosystem for physical AI, including new open foundation models that allow robots to reason, plan, and adapt across many tasks and diverse environments, moving beyond narrow task-specific bots, all of which are available on Hugging Face.
Read the full story here.
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Nvidia’s new AI system is much easier to cool
The GPUs that power contemporary AI systems use a lot of power and water, which has rightfully drawn a lot of criticism from environmental groups. But Nvidia’s keynote had some surprisingly good news on that front, as the reduced power use of the company’s new architecture also means cooling systems may get a break.
As Jensen Huang put it onstage:
The power of Vera Rubin is twice as high as Grace Blackwell. And yet, and this is the miracle, the air that goes into it, the air flow, is about the same and very importantly, the water that goes into it is the same temperature, 45°C with 45°C, no water chillers are necessary for data centers. We’re basically cooling this super computer with hot water.
We’ll still have to see what that means in practice, but it could be very good news for the ongoing data center buildout.
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The new Rubin chip architecture is already in production
Back in 2024, Nvidia announced plans for a new Rubin computing architecture. And now it’s here.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced Monday while onstage at CES 2026 that the powerful chip is in production and is expected to ramp up further in the second half of the year.
“Vera Rubin is designed to address this fundamental challenge that we have: The amount of computation necessary for AI is skyrocketing,” Huang told the audience.
Read Russell Brandom’s full story about this powerful new chip architecture.
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