What Wall Street expects from biggest tech show of the year
The 2026 CES conference, a bellwether for consumer technology, brings a heavy focus on applied use cases of artificial intelligence that could have an impact on several big tech stocks – and Wall Street is watching. The Consumer Technology Association’s CES trade show is running this week with a few notable speakers slated to kick things off. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is expected to take the stage Monday to announce the company’s new gaming offerings and other AI products, and Advanced Micro Devices chief executive Lisa Su’s keynote speech slated Monday is also expected to include updates from AMD’s suite of AI products. Jim Johnson, general manager of Intel’s client computing group, will also hold a keynote the same day where he is expected to provide updates on Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 chips. Joe Creed, the CEO of Caterpillar , is slated to give a keynote address on Wednesday about how the company is using technology to transform its operations. Robotics is expected to be at the forefront of the show this year as companies look to bring AI to the physical world. Technologies such as industrial robots, surgical robots, smart home robots, robotic sensors from companies such as Hesai , as well as updates on humanoid robots are expected to be on the floor. The ‘Godfather of AI’ to be front and center The market’s burgeoning interest in robotics applications is putting a huge spotlight on what Huang could say during his speech on Monday. “We believe this is the most important CES in decades as the AI Revolution is front and center. It all starts with the keynote speeches by the Godfather of AI Jensen and AMD’s Lisa Su to lay out the strategic AI vision for 2026,” Dan Ives, Wedbush Securities head of technology research, told CNBC. Ives said he believes that Jensen’s bullish focus on robotics could be market-moving for tech stocks such as Serve Robotics and UiPath . Shares of UiPath, a software company that offers a range of robotic process automation solutions, has gained about 24% over the past year and got a boost in early December after joining the S & P MidCap 400 . Argent Capital Management portfolio manager Jed Ellerbroek expects Huang’s keynote to center on auto and robotics applications in AI, as well as CUDA software advancements related to each. CUDA, which stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, is a technology created by Nvidia that lets programmers use a graphics processing unit, or GPU, to do general-purpose computing. Ellerbroek told CNBC he does not expect much data center news from Nvidia or AMD. The stock market’s reaction to Huang’s speech will be a telling sign of investor sentiment on Nvidia, according to Deepwater Asset Management managing partner Gene Munster. Shares of Nvidia are up roughly 30% over the past year, trailing several of its major tech and chipmaking peers. Munster wrote in a Monday post on X that he expects Huang to comment on Nvidia’s soaring demand and reaffirm the company’s $500 billion revenue target for its advanced AI systems through the end of 2026. Other announcements from Huang, such as potential gaming offerings and robotics initiatives, are “not important,” he said. “Over the past two months, investors have been reluctant to give the company credit for the good news. $NVDA’s stock reaction tomorrow will be a read on whether sentiment has shifted. I expect CY26 revenue growth will end the year up more than 65%,” Munster wrote in the X post. NVDA 1Y mountain Nvidia stock performance over the past year. Chip plays could benefit from AI-related announcements Beyond the flurry of expected keynote speeches and product launches, investors are also watching for AI updates from Samsung and commentary from panel sessions that feature executives from companies including Synopsys , Qualcomm , Nvidia and D-Wave Quantum . Gil Luria, managing director at D.A. Davidson, expects the flood of physical AI technologies announced at the show to benefit companies in the semiconductor space. Semiconductor stocks powered the S & P 500’s gains last year as investments flooded into data center infrastructure. “CES may get some more life this year,” Luria told CNBC. “Beyond incremental announcements from the chip companies, we would expect a wide range of consumer devices to be ‘AI-driven’ or ‘AI-enabled.’ Everything from household robots to wearable devices will have some AI interface or AI vision.” “All of this will bode well for these semis companies, especially Nvidia, since they will all require some semi components to make the AI magic happen,” he continued. For Luria, Intel’s chip announcement will likely not be market-moving, however. Shares of the company have rallied more than 90% over the past 12 months, driven primarily by partnerships and government funding rather than structural changes. “I think Intel would need to make a big new customer announcement to get people really excited, which we are not expecting,” Luria said.
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