Las Vegas’s CES has long been a ritual of projection — an annual stage where corporate theatre, glossy demos and marketing narratives sketch what the tech industry hopes the future will look like. In January 2026 the show still performed that role, but a different, cruder story ran underneath the headlines: Chinese companies filled the halls in unprecedented numbers, practical AI was shifting from models on screens to agents in the physical world, and investors were exchanging hype for a more forensic appetite for product-market fit.
More than 4,100 exhibitors attended CES 2026 and roughly 1,500 came from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan — more than a third of the total. That scale mattered. Several investors and industry observers who toured the show reported that Chinese firms were no longer just learning from western incumbents; they were shipping, localising, and winning customers across markets. Lenovo and TCL staged high-profile localised activations; consumer favourites like Insta360 and Roborock showed marketing muscle across venues; and a clutch of Shenzhen startups demonstrated hardware that, in the words of multiple attendees, could just as well have been shown in Shenzhen’s halls.
The most striking technical theme was the maturation of what attendees called ‘Physical AI’: multimodal models married to sensors, cameras and actuators that allow intelligence to perceive and act in three-dimensional environments. Investors heard the same line from different booths — AI moving off the screen and into embodied devices, and chatbots evolving into proactive agents. Examples ranged from precision dexterity demos (robotic manipulators that can pick and hand out thin objects) to Sleepal’s scene-aware sleep lamp and a consumer kiosk that marries AI design with instant manufacturing. These were not only proof-of-concept showcases; several exhibited repeatable behaviours that persuaded seasoned observers that the underlying stacks were reaching new levels of integration.
That said, the show also exposed a market getting crowded. Sectors such as humanoid robots, AI toys, companion devices and AR glasses showed intense competition and, according to some investors, early signs of oversupply. Numerous polished demos still relied on behind-the-scenes teleoperation or careful staging. For investors the calculus shifted from “How exciting is the demo?” to “How much can this scale, and who will pay recurrently?” This spawned a more discerning investment mood: capital is still abundant for foundational AI compute and select ecosystems, but less tolerant of indistinct consumer plays without clear monetisation or durable moats.
Another persistent thread was the idea that Chinese companies have graduated from ‘going abroad’ to genuine internationalisation. Multiple founders and investors described a new generation of entrepreneurs who understand local culture and distribution, and who design for markets rather than transplanting products. The practical implication is that price-performance advantages, supply-chain mastery and a more confident playbook for localisation are converging to make Chinese hardware a global force rather than an export curiosity.
CES 2026 also highlighted tensions that will shape the next 18 months. The biggest technical bottleneck remains compute and energy: while models and edge inference are improving, cloud-based training and inference still dominate the most advanced capabilities. The show suggested that the near-term gains from AI will be an interplay of cloud scale, improved edge chips and smarter model architectures, rather than a single breakout device that resets consumer behaviour overnight. Regulatory and market access frictions loom too: deeper internationalisation will require navigating privacy regimes, export controls and local safety standards — areas where many exhibitors will be tested in short order.
For readers outside the trade show bubble the lesson is simple: CES 2026 was less about one killer product and more about a rebalance in the industrial map. The future of consumer AI is now being decided at the intersection of software agents and commodity hardware, and that intersection is increasingly supplied and orchestrated by Chinese firms. Investors and incumbents will have to distinguish durable platform plays (agents that build proprietary data loops, edge-to-cloud stacks) from transient demos dressed up as breakthroughs.
The show’s final irony was unmistakable: where once CES crowds chased theatrical reveals, this year many of the most consequential shifts were visible in the corners — in robots that failed publicly and revealed engineering limits, in modest but repeatable products that hinted at sustainable business models, and in cultural touches at booths that signalled a new sophistication in how global markets are approached. The long arc is now clearer: AI’s headline-making models matter, but the coming decade will be won or lost on the hard work of productisation, localisation and supply-chain scale.