AMD made one thing crystal clear at CES 2026: artificial intelligence is no longer a side story in tech—it’s the main event.
Opening the CES 2026 keynote, AMD CEO Lisa Su put AI at the center of the company’s vision and used it as the lens for understanding where computing is headed next. According to Su, the world is adopting AI faster than it adopted the internet, a comparison designed to highlight just how quickly AI tools and platforms are becoming everyday essentials for consumers, businesses, and developers.
What’s powering this rapid shift is demand—massive, accelerating demand. Su pointed to a staggering metric: global compute needs have jumped by 100 times in just three years, driven largely by AI workloads. That kind of surge signals a fundamental change in how modern computing is being used. Instead of the traditional mix of browsing, streaming, and basic productivity, more and more of today’s processing power is being consumed by training AI models, running advanced inference, and supporting new AI-enabled applications across industries.
By opening the show with a singular focus on artificial intelligence, AMD’s leadership is effectively framing CES 2026 as a turning point: the moment AI becomes the primary driver of hardware innovation, infrastructure investment, and next-generation computing experiences. For anyone watching the future of chips, data centers, and personal devices, the message from AMD’s keynote was direct—the AI era isn’t approaching. It’s already here, and it’s scaling faster than anything we’ve seen before.
