AI Everywhere At CES 2026
CES 2026 was supposed to be another big moment for PC gamers waiting on fresh hardware news from the likes of Nvidia and AMD. Instead, the spotlight was almost entirely on artificial intelligence. From keynotes to product names, AI became the buzzword of the show.
Two of the biggest players for PC gamers, Nvidia and AMD, both leaned heavily into AI messaging during their main CES presentations. If you were hoping for long segments dedicated to graphics cards, gaming performance, or desktop hardware, this year probably felt a little underwhelming.
Someone actually crunched the numbers using AI powered transcription to see just how obsessed these companies have become. The results are pretty wild and they paint a clear picture of where the big chip makers think the money is right now.
AI Mentions: Nvidia, AMD, And Lenovo Compared
Nvidia is often seen as the emperor of AI thanks to its dominance in data center GPUs and machine learning hardware. Its CES presentation focused heavily on AI and robotics. Even so, it was not the "AI talking" champion of the week.
Nvidia mentioned AI 120 times in a 91 minute keynote. That works out to around 1.3 mentions of AI per minute.
AMD went even harder. Led by CEO Dr Lisa Su, AMD’s 117 minute keynote included 210 mentions of AI, or about 1.8 AI mentions per minute.
Lenovo beat them both. In a 114 minute event in the Las Vegas Sphere, Lenovo dropped AI 219 times, hitting around 1.9 mentions per minute.
Even when you look at AI as a percentage of all spoken words, the numbers are high for the two major chip makers that PC gamers watch most closely.
Roughly 1.2 percent of every word spoken during AMD’s show was just the term AI.
Nvidia was a bit behind that at around 0.95 percent of all spoken words being AI.
Some of this comes from product names like Ryzen AI Max, but even counting those, the density of AI talk is still intense. Only 13 of AMD’s AI mentions were directly tied to the Ryzen branding, so most of the usage was broader messaging about artificial intelligence, platforms, and future strategy.
It is clear from these stats that AI is not just a feature any more. For these companies, it is the headline.
Where Did Gaming Go?
For a show that PC gamers watch closely, the most surprising part of all this is how little the word gaming itself showed up in the biggest CES keynotes.
Both AMD and Lenovo only mentioned gaming three times in their main events. Nvidia, incredibly, did not say gaming at all in its big AI heavy keynote. That is despite Nvidia still being one of the most important brands in PC gaming graphics.
To be fair, Nvidia did post a separate pre recorded presentation focused on gaming announcements. So the company has not abandoned gamers. It has simply separated the AI focused narrative for investors and enterprise customers from the more traditional gaming content.
Still, the shift in focus is hard to ignore. The revenue breakdown explains a lot of this behavior.
AMD currently earns a little over 4 billion dollars each from its client and gaming segments and from its data center business. That means gaming and consumer CPUs and GPUs are still very important to AMD’s bottom line, even as it chases AI growth in servers and accelerators.
Nvidia is in a very different place. Near the end of last year, it brought in about 57 billion dollars in revenue, and only 4.3 billion of that came from gaming. Most of Nvidia’s money is flowing in from data center sales tied directly to AI workloads.
When you look at those numbers, the keynote priorities suddenly make sense. For Nvidia especially, talking to AI customers and data center buyers is where the big profits are. Gaming is still a meaningful brand pillar, but no longer the main growth engine it once was.
What This Means For PC Gamers
For PC gamers and hardware enthusiasts, CES 2026 sends a pretty clear message. The industry giants that built their reputations on graphics cards and CPUs are now primarily chasing AI opportunities. The term AI is being hammered into every pitch deck, product slide, and press release.
That does not automatically mean bad news for gaming. Powerful AI accelerators and advanced process nodes will continue to trickle down into consumer GPUs and CPUs over time. Hardware built for AI can still benefit frame rates, visual fidelity, and new features on desktop and laptop gaming rigs.
However, it does mean that the center of gravity has shifted. Instead of designing chips first and foremost for gaming and then adapting them for professional use, the priority is increasingly reversed. Top end dies might be built for data center AI loads first, with gaming variants spun off after.
The article also hints at an interesting disconnect. While companies are in an AI fever pitch, there is not yet the same level of excitement around AI features from everyday PC buyers. Even some big PC brands like Dell are hosting relatively un AI focused briefings and there is healthy skepticism about how much consumers really want AI pushed into every device.
Ironically, the AI that these firms promote so aggressively played a role in analyzing their own CES presentations. AI based transcription tools helped crunch through hours of keynote footage in about 20 minutes to tally all those AI mentions. If you dislike the methodology or the results, the writer jokingly suggests sending complaints to the major AI companies themselves.
For now, if you are following CES mainly for new GPUs, CPUs, and gaming laptops, expect a lot of AI talk to come bundled with any genuinely exciting hardware news. The chips that power tomorrow’s games will share the stage with robots, data centers, and cloud scale AI more than ever before.
The good news is that tech media is still on the ground at CES, digging through the AI noise to surface the announcements that matter to gamers. Whether it is new GPUs, gaming laptops from brands like Asus, Razer, MSI, or architecture updates from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, the real hardware details are still there. You just have to wade through a flood of AI first messaging to reach them.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/jen-hsun-needs-to-up-his-game-because-weve-run-the-numbers-and-amds-ces-keynote-hit-1-8-mentions-of-ai-per-minute-even-more-than-nvidia/
