{"id":16293,"date":"2026-01-12T17:32:31","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T17:32:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/12\/ces-showed-me-why-chinese-tech-companies-feel-so-optimistic\/"},"modified":"2026-01-12T17:32:31","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T17:32:31","slug":"ces-showed-me-why-chinese-tech-companies-feel-so-optimistic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/12\/ces-showed-me-why-chinese-tech-companies-feel-so-optimistic\/","title":{"rendered":"CES showed me why Chinese tech companies feel so optimistic"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,\u00a0sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

I decided to go to CES kind of at the last minute. Over the holiday break, contacts from China kept messaging me about their travel plans. After the umpteenth \u201cSee you in Vegas?\u201d I caved. As a China tech writer based in the US, I have one week a year when my entire beat seems to come to me\u2014no 20-hour flights required.<\/p>\n

CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, is the world\u2019s biggest tech show, where companies launch new gadgets and announce new developments, and it happens every January. This year, it attracted over 148,000 attendees and over 4,100 exhibitors. It sprawls across the Las Vegas Convention Center, the city\u2019s biggest exhibition space, and spills over into adjacent hotels.\u00a0<\/p>\n

China has long had a presence at CES, but this year it showed up in a big way. Chinese exhibitors accounted for nearly a quarter of all companies at the show, and in pockets like AI hardware and robotics, China\u2019s presence felt especially dominant. On the floor, I saw tons of Chinese industry attendees roaming around, plus a notable number of Chinese VCs. Multiple experienced CES attendees told me this is the first post-covid CES where China was present in a way you couldn\u2019t miss. Last year might have been trending that way too, but a lot of Chinese attendees reportedly ran into visa denials. Now AI has become the universal excuse, and reason, to make the trip.<\/p>\n

As expected, AI was the biggest theme this year, seen on every booth wall. It\u2019s both the biggest thing everyone is talking about and a deeply confusing marketing gimmick. \u201cWe added AI\u201d is slapped onto everything from the reasonable (PCs, phones, TVs, security systems) to the deranged (slippers, hair dryers, bed frames).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Consumer AI gadgets still feel early and of very uneven quality. The most common categories are educational devices and emotional support toys\u2014which, as I\u2019ve written about recently<\/a>, are all the rage in China. There are some memorable ones: Luka AI makes a robotic panda that scuttles around and keeps a watchful eye on your baby. Fuzozo, a fluffy keychain-size AI robot, is basically a digital pet in physical form. It comes with a built-in personality and reacts to how you treat it. The companies selling these just hope you won\u2019t think too hard about the privacy implications.<\/p>\n

Ian Goh, an investor at 01.VC, told me China\u2019s manufacturing advantage gives it a unique edge in AI consumer electronics, because a lot of Western companies feel they simply cannot fight and win in the arena of hardware.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Another area where Chinese companies seem to be at the head of the pack is household electronics. The products they make are becoming impressively sophisticated. Home robots, 360 cams, security systems, drones, lawn-mowing machines, pool heat pumps \u2026 Did you know two Chinese brands basically dominate the market for home cleaning robots in the US and are eating the lunch of Dyson and Shark? Did you know almost all the suburban yard tech you can buy in the West comes from Shenzhen, even though that whole backyard-obsessed lifestyle barely exists in China? This stuff is so sleek that you wouldn\u2019t clock it as Chinese unless you went looking. The old \u201ccheap and repetitive\u201d stereotype doesn\u2019t explain what I saw. I walked away from CES feeling that I needed a major home appliance upgrade.<\/p>\n

Of course, appliances are a safe, mature market. On the more experiential front, humanoid robots were a giant magnet for crowds, and Chinese companies put on a great show. Every robot seemed to be dancing, in styles from Michael Jackson to K-pop to lion dancing, some even doing back flips. Hangzhou-based Unitree even set up a boxing ring where people could \u201cchallenge\u201d its robots. The robot fighters were about half the size of an adult human and the matches often ended in a robot knockout, but that\u2019s not really the point. What Unitree was actually showing off was its robots\u2019 stability and balance: they got shoved, stumbled across the ring, and stayed upright, recovering mid-motion. Beyond flexing dynamic movements like these there were also impressive showcases of dexterity: Robots could be seen folding paper pinwheels, doing laundry, playing piano, and even making latte art.<\/p>\n

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CAL SPORT MEDIA VIA AP IMAGES<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

However, most of these robots, even the good ones, are one-trick ponies. They\u2019re optimized for a specific task on the show floor. I tried to make one fold a T-shirt after I\u2019d flipped the garment around, and it got confused very quickly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, they\u2019re getting a lot of hype as an\u00a0 important next frontier because they could help drag AI out of text boxes and into the physical world. As LLMs mature, vision-language models feel like the logical next step. But then you run into the big problem: There\u2019s far less physical-world data than text data to train AI on. Humanoid robots become both applications and roaming data-collection terminals. China is uniquely positioned here because of supply chains, manufacturing depth, and spillover from adjacent industries (EVs, batteries, motors, sensors), and it\u2019s already developing a humanoid training industry, as Rest of World<\/em><\/a> reported recently.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most Chinese companies believe that if you can manufacture at scale, you can innovate, and they\u2019re not wrong. A lot of the confidence in China\u2019s nascent humanoid robot industry and beyond is less about a single breakthrough and more about \u201cWe can iterate faster than the West.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chinese companies are not just selling gadgets, though\u2014they\u2019re working on every layer of the tech stack. Not just on end products but frameworks, tooling, IoT enablement, spatial data. Open-source culture feels deeply embedded; engineers from Hangzhou tell me there are AI hackathons every week in the city, where China\u2019s new \u201clittle Silicon Valley\u201d is located.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the headline innovations at CES 2026 were not on devices but in cloud: platforms, ecosystems, enterprise deployments, and \u201chybrid AI\u201d (cloud + on-device) applications. Lenovo threw the buzziest main-stage events this year, and yes, there were PCs\u2014but the core story was its cross-device AI agent system, Qira, and a partnership pitch with Nvidia aimed at AI cloud providers. Nvidia\u2019s CEO, Jensen Huang, launched Vera Rubin, a new data-center platform, claiming it would\u00a0 dramatically lower costs for training and running AI. AMD\u2019s CEO, Lisa Su, introduced Helios, another data-center system built to run huge AI workloads. These solutions point to the ballooning AI computing workload at data centers, and the real race of making cloud services cheap and powerful enough to keep up.<\/p>\n

As I spoke with China-related attendees, the overall mood I felt was a cautious optimism. At a house party I went to, VCs and founders from China were mingling effortlessly with Bay Area transplants. Everyone is building something. Almost no one wants to just make money from Chinese consumers anymore. The new default is: Build in China, sell to the world, and treat the US market like the proving ground.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}