CES 2026: Industrial AI Debuts at a Consumer Electronics Show

AI’s a bubble

Throttled by its power needs

Find another rube

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the world’s largest event of its kind, opens today in Las Vegas Nevada, promising to deliver new technologies and gadgets for consumers to spend what little money they have left in this economy. Two of Electronic Design’s crew, the ones serving the most time, Bill Wong and James Morra (with a little AI touchup that I did for fun) (Figs. 1 and 2), have escaped to Vegas and will be at CES.

If you see them rushing to their next product interview, say hello and if you’ve got some interesting tech to show off in your booth, try to nab them for a chat.

The show features several keynotes. One that caught my eye was the one from Siemens. Here’s a snippet from their press release:

“On Tuesday, January 6, 2026, 8:30 a.m. PST, Roland Busch, President and CEO will take the CES stage together with global industry leaders from NVIDIA, Microsoft, PepsiCo, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems. In the opening keynote, they will spotlight how Siemens, together with customers and partners, is accelerating the industrial AI revolution, from design and engineering to operations and real-world impact. At the center: how to scale intelligence responsibly and reliably in the physical world and turn AI into tangible value for industry, infrastructure, transportation, and energy."

Seems we have carved a new niche out — “Industrial AI” — and the only “industry” I see on their stage, apart from Siemens Energy, which is a legit business that actually makes something useful, is a soft-drink company. Because what better use case for (“industrial”) AI than infusing carbon dioxide and sugar into drinks in industrial quantities and pitching that application for AI to attendees at an ELECTRONICS show?

The Flim Flam, Man

Sarcasm aside (just for a sec, though, there’s more), this keynote’s stage is being shared with Siemens by the masters of the AI circular economy and of equities pumping (disclosure: both are key components of CBOE:SPX that I trade in now and then, Fig. 3), Wall Street rubes’ cash channelers NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). Sam Altman must have a scheduling conflict, likely getting his great hair done (apart from Andreeson and Ballmer, seems you gotta have great hair to con cash out of retail investors).

Again, why are these companies taking the keynote at a CONSUMER ELECTRONICS show? Wait... “consumer” ... retail ... retail investors ... the only real cash left to rob? On top of that, they seem to be pitching INDUSTRIAL artificial intelligence — at a CONSUMER ELECTRONICS show.

What’s even more weird is the remaining participant in that keynote, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. You *might* think,“Wait, wut, at a CONSUMER ELECTRONICS show?” Yup. Nuclear fusion; smashing two atomic nuclei together to fuse them into a different element with the promise of net positive energy output. The massive, utility-scale, technology that’s been 40 years away for at least the last 40 years (I remember reading about Princeton’s fusion Tokamak, as a kid, in Popular Science back in the 1970s). The technology that promises clean, green, electricity using abundant, practically free, “fuel.”

In those 40+ years, however, China has emerged as a manufacturing powerhouse (pun intended) for solar and wind power to the point where such energy sources are the lowest-cost, utility-scale, energy sources that are available (Fig. 4).

Trilobites and Kilobytes

Much to the glee of the fossil-fuels industry, fusion is still that 40 years away and new (fission) nuclear is 20 years away in construction and commissioning time in the West, while China seems to be able to shortcut regulations to cut that time significantly.

So, yeah, Big Fossil has embraced nuclear, and their think tanks have crafted social-media strategies to have consumer rubes embrace nuclear over the clearly cheaper and cleaner wind and solar. Their army of right-wing extremists has been trained to have environmental concerns over “holes in the ground” because solar and wind use mined materials. It ignores the fact that every gallon of gasoline these luddites burn is a new hole in the ground, unlike driving an EV which is one hole and done as the grid evolves toward wind, solar, and battery storage.

The other parroted talking point is the intermittency of solar (only while the sun shines) and wind (only while the wind blows). First, the wind farms are sited on the High Plains and offshore where the wind does indeed blow most of the time. Solution in America: cancel offshore wind leases out of feigned concern for whales while nuclear submarines blast the water with 200-dB SONAR, and for bald eagles while The White House uses a picture of a dead falcon below a wind turbine in Israel when painting one blade black reduces minuscule bird deaths (80,000 raptors a year in the U.S.) by 70%, and promises to kill 450,000 Barred Owls in the West because of bird love.

Secondly, the Chinese manufacturing powerhouse is about to supply the world with super cheap sodium-ion batteries for grid storage applications, enabling wind and solar energy to be available 24/7 for cheap.

So, why push for new nukes? There’s the delay strategy by Big Fossil that keeps oil, gas, and coal revenue flowing for at least two more decades. However, there’s also the insidious fact that the folks building new nuclear power plants are primarily members of the almost-exclusive atomic weapons club. North Korea has nuclear weapons because the Clinton Administration allowed ABB, which had Clinton’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on its board, to build new nuclear power plants for them, iirc.

Consumers, the ones who the Consumer Electronics Show is supposed to be aimed at, have been led to believe that the $billions being spent on a nuclear plant (with the latest Western scandalous spend being Hinckley Point in the UK) is for generating electricity when a nuclear plant is a plutonium factory whose BYPRODUCT is electricity. Japan has stockpiled its nuclear “product” and has recently lobbied to make its own weapons, with experts estimating they are three years away from having them.

Circle around to our august collective at the CES keynote and the sour note for AI — the thing throttling their growth (aka “stock price”) — is retail investors’ (analysts know better) understanding that electrical power limits deployment of AI data centers.

Microsoft is building its AI data center in Indiana, where there’s power available from mothballed COAL plants in the heart of coal country, formerly shuttered because of wind, solar, and cheap shale gas. There has to be a story of clean energy, but a promise that keeps Big Fossil a willing collaborator in fueling the AI hype and those stock prices. So, “fusion” takes the stage. Literally.

Con Edison

The conmen (and women) continue their equities ruse to retail consumers of equities, showing up to a consumer show with “Industrial” AI that appears to have a fizzy-drinks industrial use case for AI (I’m guessing; the keynote is in a few hours from now) and an energy solution that’s clean and 40 years away.

Will the press salivate and pick this keynote up, with its promises of clean, green, limitless free power for AI, to con more cash out of Wall Street retail investors? Yeah, probably. While Microsoft builds its AI data center in coal country? Yeah, probably.

If there are cons at CES, they won’t be wearing prison suits. And the ones I dressed up with AI, my colleagues here at Electronic Design, in orange and in stripes are some of the most honest and genuine people I know. Say hi if you see them or pull them aside to show off your latest tech. They’re very tech savvy to be able to see through any BS that’s typically foisted on a click-hungry lay press and “influencers” at a CONSUMER electronics show. The Siemens keynote is viewable, live at 9:00 AM PST, if you’re interested in what I think will be a huge spin.

Oh yeah, the AI used to make the pic fakes of Bill and James? Take a look at the height gauge in the images to see why I think AI’s a dead-end technology that will not transcend to much more than mere novelty. It doesn’t understand or reason. It can’t match my sarcasm and cynicism.

Comments, as always, welcomed below.

Enjoy,

-andyT

Andy's Nonlinearities blog arrives the first and third Monday Tuesday of every month. To make sure you don't miss the latest edition, new articles, or breaking news coverage, please subscribe to our Electronic Design Today newsletter. Please also subscribe to Andy’s Automotive Electronics bi-weekly newsletter.