CES 2026 was heavy on AI integration, humanoid robots, and hardware companies proving they can ship real products. Here are three announcements that stood out.
CES this year felt less about concept demos and more about production timelines. Robotics companies showed units ready to ship. Consumer tech emphasized AI that works offline. GPU makers targeted creators alongside gamers. Three announcements caught our attention:
Atlas goes commercial - Boston Dynamics revealed the production-ready Atlas humanoid at CES. The specs: 56 degrees of freedom, 7.5-foot reach, 110-pound lift capacity, 4-hour hot-swappable battery. More significant is the Google DeepMind partnership integrating Gemini Robotics AI. All 2026 units are already committed to Hyundai and Google. The company plans to manufacture 30,000 humanoids annually by 2028.
Lego Smart Brick - Lego calls this its most significant addition since the Minifigure in 1978. The Smart Brick is a standard 2x4 brick packed with sensors, accelerometers, a speaker with onboard synthesizer, and wireless charging. Twenty patented world-firsts run on a custom chip smaller than a Lego stud. The key innovation: BrickNet, a Bluetooth-based mesh that lets bricks communicate positions and orientations without apps or internet. First sets are Star Wars themed (Luke's X-wing at $100, Darth Vader's TIE Fighter at $70, Throne Room Duel at $160). Ships March 1.
DLSS 4.5 for creators - NVIDIA announced DLSS 4.5 with a second-gen transformer model and 6X frame generation for RTX 50 cards. For creators, the bigger news is 3x performance gains and 60% VRAM reduction for video/image AI generation through PyTorch-CUDA optimizations.
