CES 2026 was AMD’s moment to shine in the light of the ongoing AI boom, offering more chips to drive AI compute and bringing industry luminaries on stage to talk about the future.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker has already surpassed local rival Intel in revenue. But if it’s ever going to catch its other local rival, Nvidia — now the world’s most valuable company, thanks to its data center-friendly GPU chips — AMD has to prove it is just as relevant to big tech’s big moment, if not more so.
The world’s largest tech show was a chance to prove that. After all, Nvidia didn’t unveil any new GPU chips, just a forthcoming family of chips named Rubin. Dr. Lisa Su, AMD CEO, was given the spotlight of the show’s main keynote. As she noted, AMD products — the Helios rack introduced in 2025, the Epyc CPU chips — are used by every major AI company already. And she had some new PC-level AI-friendly processors, the Ryzen AI 400, waiting in the wings.
But as we’ve seen over the past three years, elbowing your way into the AI boom isn’t just about new product. It’s about making bombastic predictions, and showing lots of charts where the line goes up. And in this respect, Su delivered.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet” when it comes to AI, Su said — showing off a graph that predicted AI would go from 1 billion active users to 5 billion active users within 5 years. She didn’t explain where either figure came from (expert estimates vary wildly, with at least one 2030 estimate coming in below one billion users).
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OpenAI makes a cameo appearance
Of course, no company can make huge hopeful predictions like OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT. Su brought an OpenAI luminary up on stage before she announced any brand-new chips. Not its CEO Sam Altman (who isn’t at CES, but did offer an endorsement of Nvidia’s Rubin), but co-founder Greg Brockman. “I would love to have a GPU running in the background for every single person in the world,” Brockman says, explaining why he’s constantly asking Su for “more compute.”
More compute is what Su had to offer, along with multiple attempts to make strips of silicon seem exciting. “Helios is a monster of a rack,” she said, showing off a “double-wide design” developed in collaboration with Meta. She noted it weighed 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, relying on the company to provide six gigawatts of AI infrastructure in the years ahead as part of a deal that could see the AI giant owning up to 10 percent of AMD.
On the “bigger is better” front, Su invited White House science advisor Michael Kratsios on stage to talk about how AMD was helping the U.S. “win” the “AI race” via the Genesis Mission, a public-private partnership that aims to use AI for scientific discoveries. Kratsios was short on specifics on what exactly an AI race is and how any country can win it.
And then there was “AI for everyone,” AMD’s tagline for its PC processors. The Ryzen AI 400 is an upgrade to the Ryzen AI 300, announced in 2024 and finally arriving in on-sale PCs this quarter. AMD says the new chip will allow for 1.3x faster multitasking and is 1.7x faster at “content creation” than its competitors.
What that means exactly, we’ll have to wait and see. But in the meantime, Su offered a dizzying array of guest CEOs to talk up how AI will transform everything from healthcare to spaceflight. None of that seems to have made much difference to investors, at least. They drove AMD stock down slightly earlier in the day; it flatlined in after-hours trading.
Topics
Artificial Intelligence
CES
