Highlights of CES 2026 AMD: AI chips for everyone

CES 2026 was AMD’s time to shine a light on the ongoing AI boom, offering more chips to drive AI computing and bringing industry luminaries to the stage to talk about the future.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker has already surpassed local rival Intel in profits. But if it is ever going to catch its local rival, Nvidia – now the most important company in the world, thanks to the GPU chips that are compatible with the data center – AMD must prove that it is compatible with the big time of big technology, if not.

The world’s largest technology exhibition was an opportunity to prove it. After all, Nvidia didn’t unveil any new GPU chips, just the next family of chips named Rubin. Dr. Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, was given the spotlight for the keynote of the show. As he noted, AMD products – Helios rack launched in 2025, Epyc CPU chips – are used by all major AI companies already. He also had a new PC-level AI-friendly processor, the Ryzen AI 400, waiting in the wings.

But as we’ve seen over the past three years, elbowing into the AI ​​boom isn’t just a new product. It’s about making shocking predictions, and showing multiple charts where the line is rising. And this time, Su introduced.

“You haven’t seen anything” when it comes to AI, Su said – showing a graph that predicted AI would go from 1 billion active users to 5 billion active users within 5 years. He didn’t explain where either figure came from (expert estimates vary, with at least one 2030 estimate coming in at less than a billion users).

OpenAI makes cao look

Of course, no company can make big optimistic predictions like OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT. Su brought the OpenAI spotlight to the stage before announced any new chips. Not its CEO Sam Altman (who is not at CES, but gave the approval of Nvidia’s Rubin), but co-founder Greg Brockman. “I’d love to have a GPU running behind every single person in the world,” Brockman said, explaining why he’s always asking Su to “compute more.”

A lot of calculation is what Su had to offer, and a lot of effort to make the silicon strips look interesting. “The Helios is a beast of a rack,” he said, pointing to the “twisted design” developed in collaboration with Meta. He noted that it weighs 7,000 pounds, or “more than two compact cars.”

The announcement follows an October 2025 report that OpenAI is making an investment worth “tens of billions of dollars in revenue” in AMD, counting on the company to provide six gigawatts of AI infrastructure over the coming years as part of a deal that could see the AI ​​giant own up to 10 percent of AMD.

Before “bigger is better”, Su invited White House science adviser Michael Kratsios on stage to talk about how AMD was helping the US “win” the “AI race” through the Genesis Mission, a public-private partnership that aims to use AI to make scientific discoveries. Kratsios was brief in clarifying exactly what the AI ​​race is and how any country can win it.

Then there’s “AI for everyone,” AMD’s tagline for its PC processors. The Ryzen AI 400 is an upgrade to the Ryzen AI 300, which was announced in 2024 and finally arrived in retail PCs this quarter. AMD says the new chip will allow 1.3x faster multitasking and 1.7x faster “content creation” than its competitors.

What that actually means, we’ll have to wait and see. But for now, Su has offered a dizzying array of guest CEOs to talk about how AI will revolutionize everything from healthcare to space flight. None of this seems to have made much of a difference to investors, at least. They moved AMD stock down slowly during the day; it dissipated in after-hours trading.