What to Expect at CES 2026: AI, Displays, PCs and Rising Hardware Prices

CES 2026 kicks off the New Year with style. Here's what look like being the key themes for this year's show in Las Vegas.

Whether we like it or not, whether consumers want it or not, AI is going to be everywhere at CES 2026. Dr. Lisa Su, Chair and CEO of AMD, delivers the opening keynote and will "share her vision for delivering future AI solutions - from cloud to enterprise, edge and devices."

Spam gets its name from a venerable Monty Python sketch where a cafe only offers different dishes that all centre around spam. You can substitute AI for that now. Egg and AI; egg, bacon, and AI; egg, bacon, sausage, and AI...you get the picture.

What is different perhaps this year is that it has moved from being a standalone feature to being embedded at the very heart of a new generation of products. This makes it more difficult to avoid, but also theoretically more useful. AI is less conceptual now and more practical, and adding more contextually intelligent features, greater personalization, and a new wave of agentic capabilities that are being implemented with occasional success.

Expect the AI PC race to hot up considerably, especially in the always fecund CES territory of new laptops. We'll also see more consumer facing devices leaning into AI capabilities. This brings us genuinely useful innovations such as the Samsung Freestyle+ (below), whose AI OptiScreen is an AI-powered screen optimization technology that adds a whole raft of interesting features including the ability to correct surface distortions and even dial out the color or pattern of the projection surface.

Or, you have the likes of the Birdfy Bath Pro, a solar-powered smart birdbath equipped with a fountain that automatically takes pictures of its visitors and uses an AI model to match them to over 6000 bird species. Perhaps not everything is practical.

Displays and Visual Technology

Always an active area, 2026 promises to be even busier than usual when it comes to display tech. On the TV front we have LG’s first-ever Micro RGB TV to look forward to, while it's UltraGear evo gaming monitor lineup promises to introduce the world’s largest 5K2K gaming monitor.

In terms of pushing the boundaries, HKC promises the first 1080Hz gaming monitor, which is going to give the GPU boys something to think about. A step down to 540Hz ups the supported resolution from 1080p to 1440p and is probably going to be a bit saner to deal with.

We've already touched on the new ROG Strix XG27JCG monitor that offers dual mode switching. CES 2026 is the 20th anniversary of the ASUS ROG division, and the company is teasing that it will have plenty to celebrate.

Price Increases 

Other areas where there are expected to be entire Pandora's Boxes of new innovation include robotics, wearables, smart home ecosystems, and mobility and vehicle tech.

There is a caveat here though. One unwelcome note underpinning the whole show will be the price increases that the current global memory shortage is creating. There's a lot to this, but essentially demand for components to support the current AI data center gold rush is leading to a shortage of the consumer-oriented DRAM (system memory) and NAND (flash storage) found in pretty much everything.

This is helping create scarcity and elevate prices, and is rumored to be changing the release strategies and product development roadmaps of a whole raft of different companies and product categories. Everything from Nintendo's share price dropping because key components in the Switch 2 are more expensive, to a rise in CFexpress card prices, to Dell warning of price increases is in the mix. One to keep an eye on.