Gigabyte loudly and proudly says it's 'AI Forward' at CES 2026

As you might expect from CES 2026, we're already starting to see all things AI. Gigabyte is just one company redoubling its commitment to the machine learning tech, unveiling its latest AI server ecosystem during this year's tradeshow and proudly claiming the "AI Forward" banner.

Gigabyte going big on AI is nothing new, loudly and proudly describing itself as an AI company during its Computex 2024 presentation. Today's CES announcement introduces a selection of local AI offerings in the form of the AI Top series. The flagship AI Top Atom is billed as a "personal AI supercomputer, delivering petaflop-scale performance in a compact, energy-efficient form factor." With 128 GB of RAM, it's suited towards local AI development and thrashing at 200B parametre Large Language Models.

At CES 2026, the Taiwanese company also unveiled their modular, "one-stop AI data center solution" fittingly called the Gigapod. Gigabyte says, "[It] integrates high-performance servers, high-speed networking, and Gigabyte Pod Manager (GPM) software, streamlining AI infrastructure design, deployment, and validation—accelerating the creation of enterprise AI Factories."

It's perhaps an oddly large scale business solution to tout at the consumer electronics show, but a particularly interesting to contrast against dear old Dell's CES 2026 presentation. CES is an event that has become suffused with all things AI in recent years and, to be clear, Dell isn't done with AI—the company simply recognises that the average end user isn't all that fussed about AI features.

Dell head of product Kevin Terwilliger explained, "What we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI. In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."

It's notable as consumer demand is arguably the AI industry's next big hurdle; if big tech companies can't create something in the way of a 'killer app' that end users want to pay for, then the AI industry's financial viability may crumble over the longer term. Perhaps that's one reason why Gigabyte has been so loud about its AI business solutions at the consumer-focused tradeshow—every little bit helps, and the enterprise sector often has more to spend.

AMD's Lisa Su says "emphatically" that there's no AI bubble, and IBM's Arvind Krishna is of a similar mind. Still, market analysts also claim that not only is the industry very much blowing up a bubble, but that the AI bubble is four times larger than the subprime bubble that caused the 2008 crash. With how many billions are tied up in circular investments like the partnerships between Anthropic, Microsoft, and Nvidia, or Nvidia and OpenAI, I'm less inclined to take the tech CEOs' word for it—though even Sam Altman has previously said "Someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money" due to unwise AI investments.