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- Here are the biggest announcements from the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show.
- Nvidia unveiled the Vera Rubin architecture at CES, launching production ahead of schedule.
- Nvidia says Rubin offers over triple the speed of Blackwell chips for AI demands.
The tech scene is starting the year off strong.
On January 6, the Consumer Electronics Show, the largest and most influential technology trade show, is set to kick off in Las Vegas.
A CES keynote presentation of a new chip from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang already got the show started.
Based on early announcements, the audience can expect novelties this year like the Sweekar AI pet that physically grows, robots that can bend backwards, and a wallpaper TV that is only 0.35 inches thick. Business Insider’s Lloyd Lee is also on the scene to report on the latest autonomous vehicle technologies.
Follow this post over the rest of the week to keep up with the most groundbreaking tech at the 2026 CES.
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On Monday, ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show, Huang officially introduced the Vera Rubin architecture, which is now in production and expected to ramp up in volume in the second half of the year. This move follows a blockbuster year for its Blackwell chip, as demand for AI infrastructure continued to surge.
In a press briefing ahead of Huang’s keynote, Dion Harris, Nvidia’s senior director of HPC and AI infrastructure solutions, described Vera Rubin as “six chips that make one AI supercomputer.”
“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 during a presentation at the CES.
Huang added that compared to the Blackwell model, Rubin marks a leap in performance, with more than triple the speed, could run inference five times faster, and can deliver significantly more inference compute per watt of energy.
Rubin was first announced in 2024 and has been slated to replace Blackwell ever since. The early debut comes months ahead of the late-2026 timeline Nvidia had previously projected.
Named after astronomer Vera Rubin, who discovered the existence of dark matter, Nvidia said in a press release that the architecture is designed to support more complex, agent-style AI workloads, as well as more networking and data movement.
The Rubin systems are already lined up for deployment across much of the cloud industry. Nvidia said partners, including Amazon Web Services, OpenAI, Anthropic, alongside the upcoming Doudna system at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, all plan to use the new platform.
The accelerated launch comes shortly after Nvidia reported record data center revenue, up 66% from a year earlier, driven largely by demand for Blackwell and Blackwell Ultra GPUs. Those chips have become a benchmark for the current AI boom are widely seen as a test of whether spending on AI infrastructure is sustainable.
Huang has previously estimated that between $3 trillion and $4 trillion could be spent globally on AI infrastructure over the next five years. Nvidia said products and services built on the Rubin platform will begin rolling out from partners in the second half of 2026.
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Nvidia’s Huang also used his presentation to unveil Alpamayo, a new open AI model and toolset designed to bring reasoning to autonomous vehicles.
Huang said that Mercedes-Benz cars powered by the system are already expected to hit the road in the first quarter of 2026.
“Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous,” said Huang.
Alpamayo is Nvidia’s first full-stack push into self-driving technology, with the goal of using vision-language-action models to handle rare and unfamiliar driving scenarios.
Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius said during the presentation that he recently tested the Nvidia-powered system on public roads and drove for more than an hour through heavy traffic.
“It feels that the car is on rails. You’re just driving, and it does everything,” Källenius said. “If you’re moving an object that weighs 4,000 pounds at 50 miles an hour, sorry is not going to cut it.”
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Boston Dynamics is teaming up with Google DeepMind to integrate the Gemini AI into its humanoid robot, Atlas, and its robot dog called Spot. Unveiled with Boston Dynamics’s parent company, Hyundai Motor Group, at CES on Monday, the partnership aims to let Atlas understand natural-language commands, adapt on the fly, and interact more naturally with people, with the goal of pushing the machine from lab demos into real-world work.
Executives of Boston Dynamics said in a press release that by embedding a foundation model, Atlas could move beyond preprogrammed actions to navigating unfamiliar environments and identifying and manipulating objects, all of which are core skills for manual labor.
“Atlas is going to revolutionize the way industry works,” said CEO Robert Playter in the press release, “And it marks the first step toward a long-term goal we have dreamed about since we were children—useful robots that can walk into our homes and help make our lives safer, more productive, and more fulfilling.”