CES 2026
AMD CEO Lisa Su: 'The Real Deal Hasn't Even Started… Let's Move Into the Era of the Yotta'

[비즈한국] The topic brought up by AMD CEO Lisa Su was intense. She declared that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has evolved beyond a mere technological trend into an ‘agent’ that assists human life in real-time. To support this, she announced the need for computing power 10,000 times stronger than what we have today—an infrastructure capable of reaching the yottaflops scale. This leap in computational ability, moving beyond tera and peta, and through zetta toward yotta, marks the moment the AI infrastructure paradigm shifts.

At 6:30 PM local time on January 5, the first keynote session marking the start of 'CES 2026' was held at the Venetian Expo in Las Vegas. This marks the fourth time CEO Lisa Su has taken the stage as a main keynote speaker at CES. Having presented innovative technology roadmaps every time since her first appearance in 2019, CEO Su returned to the stage after about three years since 2023.

Her keynote speeches, which have elevated AMD into a powerhouse of high-performance computing, always garner significant industry attention. On this day, industry focus was so intense that even 30 minutes before the event began, the Consumer Technology Association's (CTA) premium customer reserved seating area was already completely filled.

"The real deal hasn't even started yet"

CEO Su opened by saying, "We haven't even shown you the real deal yet." The vision she presented can be summarized in numbers. Global computing demand, which was at the 1 zettaflop level in 2022, is projected to surge to over 10 yottaflops—10,000 times that amount—by around 2030.

CEO Lisa Su diagnosed, "When the AI user base reaches 5 billion and the era of 'agents' that can judge and act on their own—beyond just answering questions—arrives, existing infrastructure will be vastly insufficient." Ultimately, AMD's perspective is that the key to realizing this grand vision begins with the ‘Chip’ and is completed by the ‘System.’

The highlight of the day's speech was the physical unveiling of the next-generation AI rack-scale platform, ‘Helios.’ Weighing a staggering 7,000 pounds (approximately 3.1 tons), equivalent to the weight of two mid-sized cars, this equipment is a high-performance system where 72 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) operate as a single chip. At its heart, it is equipped with the AI accelerator ‘Instinct MI455,’ featuring 2nm and 3nm process technology and HBM4 memory, as well as the next-generation server CPU, ‘Venice.’ Venice utilizes 256 high-performance Zen 6 cores to resolve bottlenecks in AI computation.

Greg Brockman, President of OpenAI, who appeared as the first guest speaker, is someone who tells Lisa Su that "we need more computing power" every time they meet. CEO Su and President Brockman are partners who have signed multi-billion dollar chip supply contracts. President Brockman supported the roadmap presented by the MI455 and Helios, saying, "I want to build a world where I wake up in the morning and ChatGPT has already handled all my work and household chores, but that is impossible with current computing resources."

If hardware is the muscle, software and models are the intelligence. Amit Jain, CEO of Luma AI, demonstrated the process of instantly generating and editing 4K HDR-level videos using ‘Ray 3,’ the world's first inference video model. Attention was drawn to the model's ability to understand physical laws and create video, rather than just sequencing pixels.

The appearance of Fei-Fei Li, CEO of World Labs and often called the ‘Godmother of AI,’ was one of the moments that drew the biggest response. CEO Li showcased the ‘Marble’ model, which converts AMD's Silicon Valley office into a perfect 3D space using only a few flat photos. This is the first product released by CEO Li, also a professor at Stanford University, shortly after she founded the startup World Labs last year. She demonstrated how AI equipped with spatial intelligence could change the landscape of architecture, robotics, and game development, signaling a paradigm shift in visual information.

Emphasizing Technology for Humanity… "Investing $150 Million in AI Education"

CEO Lisa Su also put effort into a strategy of bringing the immense power of data centers to individual users' PCs. The newly announced ‘Ryzen AI Halo’ is a compact form factor no larger than the palm of a hand, yet it can run huge models with 200 billion parameters locally without a cloud connection. AMD’s expectation that this will be a game changer in the enterprise AI market, where security and speed are vital, was also evident.

In the healthcare field as well, AMD’s technology is contributing to accelerating cancer diagnosis and optimizing drug development pipelines. Partners such as AstraZeneca are shortening candidate substance delivery speeds by 50% through AI, leading the transition from disease treatment to prevention and precision medicine.

Toward the end of the speech, CEO Lisa Su shared her philosophy on fostering next-generation talent. She pledged to invest $150 million to introduce AI education into classrooms across the country and provide free online AI courses to 150,000 students.

Through the two-hour speech by CEO Su and leaders from partner companies, AMD demonstrated that it is transforming from a company that simply sells chips into an infrastructure company that supports the ‘Yotta Era.’ CEO Lisa Su encouraged the rest of the CES 2026 journey, saying, "Together, we are working to bring AI everywhere and to everyone."