The 2026 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) concluded with AI still front and centre. Amidst a turbulent couple of years for the tech industry, there is a notable shift in product line-ups and offerings showcased by large players; more services and integrations pick up where CES 2025 left off, raising questions of privacy and ownership that firms are aware of, yet cautious to answer.

AMD and Nvidia recognise their own need for vast amounts of computing power, as they seek to bring 2025’s buzzwords “physical” and “agentic” AI into consumers’ hands, along with this year’s “edge” AI. Rather than a focus on tangible consumer-spec GPUs and processors, a shift into a centralised, service-based pay model is materialising.

AI gigafactories: Beyond manufacturing

 Historically, Nvidia and AMD have used CES to launch upgraded product lines. For many consumers, these firms are synonymous with GeForce and Radeon graphics cards, while AMD also supplies Ryzen processors. At CES 2026, however, their focus had shifted from on- and in-device features to a more centralised approach for increasing both consumers’ and enterprise-level processing power. Nvidia, which almost monopolises graphics cards, had no new consumer GPU to announce. Rather than focusing on the apparent bottlenecking of supply, it presented advances in the physical and edge AI world.

Leveraging Lenovo’s supercomputer expertise, a new Lenovo-Nvidia partnership announces an “AI gigafactory”. No longer solely the realm of batteries and EV motors, the term will extend to Lenovo’s “AI Cloud Gigafactory” which uses its “Neptune” liquid cooling technology combined with Nvidia’s Blackwell, Grace Hopper, and new Vera Rubin chip architectures to increase the speed AI responds to real-world stimuli. With Nvidia expanding further into robotics and physical AI, the slew of autonomous vehicles (Uber teasing a fleet to compete with Waymo) and industrial robotics (Boston Dynamics’ robotics designs replicated throughout the convention) demonstrated at CES will be able to choose between an on-premise, localised AI computer and renting the gigafactory’s centralised computer.

Wearables and their discontents

 What could the consumer look to? AI integration-enabled wearables dominated stage time throughout CES with firms showcasing everything from TWS headphones and open-earbuds to health-tech smart rings. Wearable electronics is forecast to grow at a steady 5% year-on-year to 2030, amidst a disrupted consumer electronics industry afflicted by lowered expendable income, tariff disruptions, and inflated costs due to AI’s insatiable resource draw.

Wearables operate on several levels to market themselves to consumers: personalised, meaningful information about oneself, day-to-day efficiencies, and integration with the broader systems the consumer uses. Wearables are inherently an intimate business requiring the user to place higher-than-usual trust in the technology worn. With AI increasingly in the mix, privacy and data security questions abound, with manufacturers keenly aware of this.

Another Lenovo partnership, with Qualcomm, exemplifies the industry’s approach. Integrating a newly-launched AI agent named Qira, Lenovo’s proof-of-concept necklace pin, glasses, laptop, and phone system seek to streamline your day-to-day behaviours, messaging patterns, and even memory creation via autonomous recording and picture taking, into an automated flow that creates a “digital twin” that “thinks” like you (imitates the patterns you give Qira access to). “With your permission, of course” was a phrase punctuating the presentation, flagging the possible concerns with the creation of so intimate a record of one’s behaviour.

On services and the future of ownership

 The services offered by Qira, Lenovo and any firm seeking to imitate the apparent model proposed by the state of AI will require increasing amounts of faster compute as adoption increases. A prediction from CES held that “within 3 years 80% of the PC market would be Ai PCs”. As centralisation of the resources which enable AI seems to be the way forward, a focus shift towards services and AI enablement appears to be imminent, mirroring shifts in streaming that pushed aside physical media in favour of Netflix and Spotify. The question of ownership arises, particularly for data and computing power, as even the right to repair has been in and out of US and European courts recently. Whichever way the pendulum swings, the tech world is in the middle of quite the shift.

Free trade is breaking down in the wake of Trump’s protectionist policies. Wearables is predicted to grow just as Chinese brands (eg Xiaomi, Huawei) make up a significant portion of popular subsectors such as activity wearables. Closing the de minimis exemption leaves the industry shaken. Find out more about the wearables market’s own need to pivot in our Future of Wearables Briefing.