CES may have started out as the Consumer Electronics Show, but it has never been solely about consumers. That was true before the AI boom, and it’s even more true today. Jaded tech journalists who’ve prowled the halls for a decade (and usually more) don’t want to hear the AI talk, but the topic is so pervasive at the event that even hopeful skeptics can turn to cynicism. It’s not that AI is a worthless advancement. Quite the opposite; AI is such a monumental shift in computing that it begs for bandwagon products aimed at easy investor dollars.
Nvidia and its monumental rise into the mainstream of speculative assets has led that charge, but AMD has been taking notes. And at CES 2026, AMD looked a lot like Nvidia. CEO Lisa Su took the stage for a two-hour keynote, joined by an ensemble of partners that don’t come anywhere near consumer technology, all driven by a simple thesis: “AI everywhere.” Although it won’t comfort PC enthusiasts, from a business perspective, it’s a fair focus for the opening CES keynote.
Still, it’s a stark contrast from the AMD of even 12 months ago, and an even starker contrast to Intel. Under the leadership of Pat Gelsinger, the public-facing Intel quickly jumped on the AI boom. Presentations became winding events focused on road maps and geopolitics, as Intel tried to play a game it was struggling to be a player in. The Intel at CES 2026 was far different. It presented a tight, 45-minute keynote that was laser-focused on its latest, most exciting consumer announcement: Panther Lake.
AMD briefly touched on its new Ryzen AI 400 ‘Gorgon Point’ chips during the keynote, but it felt like little more than a footnote in the two-hour presentation. And the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which is probably the most important announcement for Tom’s Hardware readers, didn't even get a callout. That’s not to mention the fact that Gorgon Point is little more than a refresh of the Strix Point chips that are already available. I wonder, if AMD hadn’t changed its mobile branding to include “AI,” if Gorgon Point would’ve been cut from the keynote, as well.
AI is everywhere, and for AMD to ignore that fact would be detrimental to its business. But we should approach this topic realistically, lest it devolves into complaining that AMD didn’t announce or focus on the products I (or you) specifically want. The problem isn’t AI. The problem isn’t that AMD isn’t in an opportune time in its product cycle to announce new CPUs or GPUs. And the problem isn't that AMD has bold data center ambitions.
The problem is that AMD spoke little to consumers and gave them even less to actually care about. Intel did the opposite.
There’s still room for consumers in AI
We need some context before continuing. Last year at CES, AMD’s keynote included several consumer announcements. The company revealed the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D, expanded Strix Point and lined up Kraken Point, teased RDNA 4 and FSR 4, and introduced Strix Halo. The year prior, AMD introduced the RX 7600 XT, refreshed select Zen 3 chips, introduced Hawk Point as a refresh of Phoenix, and introduced Zen 4 APUs under the Ryzen 8000G brand. Both of these keynotes focused heavily on AI, make no mistake. But they also spoke to consumers.
This year, for its CES launches, AMD announced refreshed Strix Point processors called Gorgon Point, introduced new Strix Halo SKUs, and revealed the Ryzen 7 9850X3D. Of those three consumer announcements, only one was mentioned in the keynote. Further, even with a section of the keynote dedicated to personal computing and a subsection within that talking specifically about Strix Halo, AMD didn’t even discuss its new Strix Halo SKUs. Instead, it announced a DGX Spark competitor called Ryzen AI Halo, undercutting the last 12 months of effort in engaging OEMs to build out their Strix Halo offerings. It also ignores the clear issue AMD has with accelerators compared to Nvidia, with AMD still using two entirely different architectures across the consumer and data center segments.
Perhaps the clearest example that AMD lost its consumer focus is the new AI Bundle coming to Radeon Software. This bundle includes some AI software like PyTorch that’s configured to run on Radeon GPUs. The idea, as AMD’s president of GPU Technologies and Chief Software Officer Andrej Zdravković later shared with me, is to remove the barrier to entry in installing and configuring all of this software. Its goal is to get consumers with consumer-grade AMD hardware playing with these tools to leverage the AI capabilities that the broader industry insists are important for consumers. It, too, was cut from the keynote.
Instead, much of the two-hour run time was filled by AMD’s partners. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman presented a story about ChatGPT users sharing their health information with AI and suggesting it was better than a real doctor. John Couluris of Blue Origin — a company perhaps best known to consumers for sending Katy Perry on a mission and creating a suggestively shaped rocket — talked about AMD hardware going into space. And Michael Kratsios, scientific advisor to the White House, ended the keynote talking about supercomputing and President Trump’s plans for AI. Regardless of your political views, stance on generative AI, or interest in space exploration, none of this is even remotely focused on consumers.
A two-hour keynote doesn’t need to pander to one specific audience. AMD is a large business with many customers across different fields, and it carries a certain responsibility in opening the largest tech trade show in the US to set the tone of the event across multiple categories. It served only to reinforce the idea that consumers don’t have a place in the AI future. Even with announcements focused on consumer AI, AMD chose to cut them.
Even with partners that create consumer products, AMD focused on the amount of compute it was able to ship to them. With 120 minutes to tell consumers about why they should care about “AI everywhere,” especially with RAM prices soaring and data centers putting unreasonable demands on electrical infrastructure, AMD mostly reinforced what many consumers currently feel, regardless of if it’s true of not — AI is a trend for Wall Street speculators that has infiltrated enthusiasts circles to rip apart pricing and supply chains, not dissimilar to what this group has experienced with cryptocurrency multiple times in the past.
The consumer market is still very important for AMD. In its most year earnings report, AMD's client and gaming business accounted for roughly half of its revenue — $4 billion compared to $4.3 billion in the data center — and saw nearly three times the rate of growth as its data center business year-over-year. Nvidia, which has largely abandoned any consumer focus during its keynotes, is seeing less than a tenth of its total revenue from its gaming business.
Intel went back to basics
Intel needs context, as well. Last year, Intel’s hour-long CES keynote included a victory lap with Lunar Lake, the announcement of the lower-end Arc B570 discrete GPU, Arrow Lake-H for mobile, additional Arrow Lake desktop SKUs, and a focus on Copilot+ and Intel vPro. The year prior, Intel carried the same thesis of “AI everywhere” as AMD shared this year, contextualizing its announcements of U-series Meteor Lake processors, 14th-gen HX processors for laptops, and additional 14th-gen desktop SKUs around their use in AI applications.
Again, there was a stark change this year. Intel presented a 45-minute keynote that felt like you’d blink and miss it. It was laser-focused on Panther Lake, and Intel still touched on the geopolitics of its position as the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the US, gaming, the applications of Panther Lake in AI, and even some retrospectives on its history with Arc graphics. It seemed like a self-aware Intel that we haven’t seen in at least a decade, probably longer. There’s no greater evidence of that than Dan Rogers, VP of PC products at Intel, stating that Intel’s graphics drivers have been “Ubiquitously deployed, with a massive install base, but previously, lacking in key features, driver support, and frankly, performance.”
Intel has broader news to talk about. It showed off a humanoid robot powered by Panther Lake, showcasing its embedded validation for the generation. Over the past six months, Intel has seen major investments from Nvidia and Softbank. And just last month, Intel announced major leadership changes, including a new executive leading Intel’s relationship with the government and politicians.
Intel certainly had fewer announcements than AMD. Although the consumer front is roughly identical, with both companies introducing new ranges of mobile chips, AMD also revealed the Helios Rack it's been teasing for half a year, expanded its Instinct roadmap, and brought forth its Ryzen AI Halo development box. Intel didn’t talk about new Xeon chips, rack-scale solutions, or engagements in robotics or AI. Intel hasn't clearly defined its AI strategy for the enterprise yet, and perhaps if Intel were in the position AMD is currently in, there would be a greater data center focus.
The greatest move Intel made at CES 2026 this year was to tell consumers why they should care about their latest product; in this case, Panther Lake. A clear example of that was Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas appearing during Intel's keynote. Srinivas is an AI executive, but he joined Intel to make an argument for on-device AI capabilities, touching on the security, economic, and speed benefits of having local AI compute. Indirectly, it spoke to the concerns of rising RAM prices and massive AI data center expansion. It made an argument to consumers about why they should care about AI without ignoring the broader implications about what AI expansion means for all of us.
There is no doubt that Intel would show off rack-scale solutions and hammer on a road map for AI accelerators if it had anything to share on that front; it doesn't. AMD does, so it makes sense that AMD touched on its future Instinct MI500X accelerators, Helios Rack, and Pensando NIC. It's the surrounding narrative around these product announcements where there's a significant divergence between Intel and AMD.
The table is set
Regardless of what you think about AMD or Intel, the dynamics between the two companies are shifting. A year ago, it wasn’t clear what the future of Intel looked like, and just six months ago, there were legitimate questions about whether the brand would even survive. From a market share perspective, Intel is still competitive with AMD. When looking at financials, Intel brings in more than double what AMD does in the consumer segment. The writing has already faded on the walls, though. AMD has seen massive momentum quarter-over-quarter, while Intel's financials look caught in stasis.
That dynamic showed up at CES 2026. AMD’s presence suggested its consumer announcements weren’t important, with releases like the Ryzen 7 9850X3D feeling like table scraps for a company going after the multi-trillion-dollar market cap of Nvidia. Intel, delivering its keynote to just a fourth of the audience of AMD's — likely even less, but I’m being generous — couldn’t afford to wax poetic about AI. It had to focus, and focus it did.
Where we go from here remains uncertain. Neither Intel nor AMD had major desktop announcements at CES, which isn’t surprising. Intel confirmed we’ll see an Arrow Lake Refresh on desktop at some point, while the heavily-rumored Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 is presumably in AMD’s back pocket. The real battle happens later this year. Zen 6 is on track for the back half of 2026, as is Nova Lake, where Intel is expected to finally introduce its bLLC packaging to combat AMD’s wildly successful 3D V-Cache.
The dynamics at CES this year provide some hints on how AMD and Intel will approach the next generation of desktop CPUs. Intel has clearly recognized its new position in the market, and it seems AMD — at least based on my conversations at CES and AMD’s focus on AI market expansion during its keynote — may struggle to reckon with the potential of stagnation as a market leader.
For Intel and AMD, focus isn’t a zero-sum game. An emphasis on the data center doesn’t have to come at the cost of another product category. At this point, however, it feels like the AI focus does come at a cost. AMD will have to balance a business that has grown even wider than it already was in the past 12 months, especially if Intel continues to double down on the consumer market, where it has lost so much ground.
