“Chips” is now the “C” in CES

While the focus of CES 2026 remained on consumer electronics, this year felt different. More expansive, with the semiconductor industry dominating the pre-show with overlapping announcements that reveal diverging strategies for AI workload acceleration, manufacturing sovereignty, and market expansion beyond traditional computing segments.
Research Report: Cisco FlashStack with Nutanix

The enterprise infrastructure market is faced with disruption across multiple fronts. Traditional virtualization platforms face unprecedented disruption, while emerging AI-first workloads demand architectures that seamlessly span on-prem, cloud, and edge environments.
It’s against this backdrop that Nutanix, Cisco, and Pure Storage have collaborated to reimagine converged infrastructure with Cisco’s FlashStack with Nutanix.
Research Note: Qualcomm Validates Wi‑Fi 8 Silicon with LitePoint — A Key Readiness Milestone

For enterprise leaders the marketing noise of Wi-Fi 8 is beginning to be replaced by concrete readiness indicators.
Building the “Always‑On” Store – HPE’s Practical Approach to Retail at NRF 2026

HPE’s presence at NRF 2026 shows a broader industry shift toward “always‑on” retail
Stop Buying Labels and Start Buying Silicon

Most buyers never ask about it.
Most vendors never volunteer it.
But it’s the only part of the AP that actually matters: the silicon.
Research Note: VAST’s Novel Approach to NVIDIA’s new Inference Context Memory Storage Platform

VAST Data announced support for NVIDIA’s recently unveiled Inference Context Memory Storage (ICMS) Platform, targeting the NVIDIA Rubin GPU architecture. The announcement addresses the challenge of managing KV cache data that exceeds GPU and CPU memory capacity as context windows scale to millions of tokens across multi-turn, agentic AI workflows.
Research Note: Improving Inference with NVIDIA’s Inference Context Memory Storage Platform

At NVIDIA Live at CES 2026, NVIDIA introduced its Inference Context Memory Storage (ICMS) platform as part of its Rubin AI infrastructure architecture. NVIDIA’s ICMS addresses KV cache scaling challenges in LLM inference workloads.
The technology targets a specific gap in existing memory hierarchies where GPU high-bandwidth memory proves too limited for growing context requirements while general-purpose network storage introduces latency and power consumption penalties that degrade inference efficiency.
NVIDIA at CES: When the Compute Stack Outgrew the Showroom

Jensen used the stage to argue that the world is shifting from CPU‑centric computing to AI‑driven, GPU‑first platforms, and the shift isn’t just for hyperscalers.
Research Note: Dynatrace & Google Cloud Collaborate on Observability for Agentic AI

Dynatrace and Google Cloud have expanded their collaboration to provide observability capabilities for agentic AI workloads through two primary integrations: a Gemini CLI extension for developer access to observability data within terminal environments, and an A2A protocol integration with Gemini Enterprise for real-time system monitoring.