I almost didn’t go to CES this year. Seriously. My plan was to enjoy a quiet holiday break, but then the messages started rolling in. One after another, contacts from China pinged me: “See you in Vegas?” After about the tenth one, I threw in the towel and booked a flight.
As a tech writer covering China from the US, CES is that one week a year where my entire beat conveniently comes to me. No 20-hour flights, no jet lag—just a whole lot of walking through the sprawling Las Vegas Convention Center.
And let me tell you, this year felt different.
China has always had a footprint at CES, but this wasn't a footprint; it was a full-on stomp. Nearly a quarter of all the companies exhibiting were from China. You couldn’t walk ten feet without bumping into Chinese engineers, founders, and VCs. People who’ve been going for years told me this was the first post-COVID show where China’s presence was truly, undeniably, back in a big way.
The universal excuse for the trip? Two letters: A.I.
So, Was Everything “AI-Powered”? (Spoiler: Yes.)
You couldn’t escape it. AI was the magic pixie dust sprinkled on everything. It was plastered on every booth, in every keynote, and on every product tag.
Sometimes, it made sense. We saw AI in new PCs, smarter phones, and next-gen security systems. But then things got weird. We're talking AI-powered hair dryers, AI-enhanced bed frames, and—I kid you not—AI slippers. It reached a point where "we added AI" felt like both the most important trend and a completely meaningless marketing gimmick at the same time.
A lot of the consumer AI gadgets felt… early. The quality was all over the place. The most common things I saw were educational devices for kids and little emotional support toys, which are apparently a huge deal in China right now.
Some were memorable, for better or worse. There was a robotic panda from Luka AI that scoots around and watches your baby. Then there was Fuzozo, a fluffy little keychain robot that’s basically a Tamagotchi brought to life. It has its own personality and reacts to how you treat it. Super cute, but you’re just hoping the companies behind them don’t want you to think too hard about the data they’re collecting.
I chatted with Ian Goh, an investor at 01.VC, who put it perfectly. He said China's insane manufacturing power gives it a massive head start in AI hardware. A lot of Western companies just feel like they can't compete on that front, so they don't even try.
Your Next Lawnmower Will Probably Come From Shenzhen
Here’s something that really surprised me: the sheer sophistication of Chinese household electronics.
Forget the old stereotype of cheap, knock-off gadgets. The stuff I saw was sleek, powerful, and genuinely impressive. I’m talking about home robots, 360-degree security cameras, drones, and even pool heat pumps.
Did you know that two Chinese brands basically own the home cleaning robot market in the US? They’re running circles around names like Dyson and Shark. And almost all that fancy tech for your suburban backyard—the robot lawnmowers, the smart sprinklers—it’s coming out of Shenzhen, a city where most people don't even have backyards.
This stuff is so well-designed you wouldn't even guess it was from a Chinese company unless you looked it up. I walked away from those halls seriously considering a major upgrade for my own home.
Okay, Let's Talk About the Dancing Robots
Of course, nothing draws a crowd at CES like a humanoid robot. And the Chinese companies put on one heck of a show.
It was a spectacle. Robots were dancing to Michael Jackson, doing K-pop routines, and even performing traditional lion dances. Some were doing backflips. One company, Hangzhou-based Unitree, set up a literal boxing ring where you could "fight" their little robots.
The robots were about half the size of a person, and yeah, they usually got "knocked out," but that wasn't the point. Unitree was showing off their incredible balance and stability. You could shove them, watch them stumble, and they’d recover mid-motion without falling. It was wild to see.
Beyond the acrobatics, they were also showing off fine motor skills. I saw robots folding paper pinwheels, doing laundry, playing the piano, and even making latte art.
Now, let’s be real. Most of these are one-trick ponies. They’re programmed to do one specific, impressive thing on the show floor. I tried to trick one by flipping a t-shirt around before it folded it, and the poor thing got confused immediately.
Still, there’s a reason for all the hype. Humanoid robots could be the key to pulling AI out of our screens and putting it into the physical world. The next logical step after language models is vision-language models—AI that can see and interact with the world.
But that leads to a huge problem: there’s way, way less data about the physical world than there is text data on the internet. So, these robots become two things at once: an application for AI and a walking, talking data-collection machine. And with its supply chains and manufacturing muscle, China is in a unique position to lead that charge.
The Real Story Wasn't the Gadgets
As cool as the dancing robots were, the most important conversations weren't happening around the hardware. They were about what powers it all.
Chinese companies aren't just selling you a finished product anymore. They're building at every level: the frameworks, the developer tools, the IoT platforms, the spatial data. There’s a palpable open-source culture taking root. Engineers from Hangzhou told me their city—China’s new “little Silicon Valley”—has AI hackathons every single week.
The biggest announcements at CES weren't even about devices. Lenovo threw some of the buzziest events, and sure, they showed off new PCs, but the real story was their AI agent that works across all your devices. Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, took the stage to launch a new data-center platform designed to slash the cost of training AI. AMD’s CEO, Lisa Su, introduced another massive system for running huge AI workloads.
This is where the real race is. It’s about making the cloud computing behind AI cheap and powerful enough to keep up with our ambitions.
A New Kind of Confidence
So, what was the overall vibe? I’d call it “cautious optimism.”
I went to a house party packed with Chinese founders and VCs mingling with people from the Bay Area. The energy was infectious. Everyone was building something.
And here’s the biggest shift I noticed: almost no one is content with just selling to the Chinese market anymore. The new playbook is clear: Build in China, sell to the world, and use the U.S. market as the ultimate test.
It’s a quiet confidence. It’s not about one single breakthrough product. It’s a belief that they can simply build, test, and iterate faster than anyone else. And after what I saw in Vegas, I have to say, they might be right.
