Excerpted from the December 9, 2024 edition of Sree's Sunday Note.
It’s almost that time again: Winter arrives, days start to get longer and gadget geeks start to prognosticate what flashy, shiny gizmos will be announced at the annual CES electronics mega-showcase in January.
For the first time since 2020, CES (once called the Consumer Electronics Show), will fill the entire Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) campus plus other venues. This marks a full comeback from CES 2021, which was all-virtual due to the pandemic.
CES 2022 to 2024 filled LVCC’s Central and North Halls and spilled into West Hall, which opened in 2021, but for those years the gigantic, two-level South Hall complex remained vacant. While the growing physical footprint of CES 2025 bodes well, the number of attendees and the quality of the exhibitors remains in question.
According to the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which operates CES, 138,789 attendees and 4,312 exhibitors were at CES 2024 in January, a marked increase from the 117,841 attendees and about 3,200 exhibitors at CES 2023. However, no attendance estimates for CES 2025, which runs Jan. 7 to 10 after two media-only days, were made during an online press conference last week.
A peek at the CES 2025 exhibitor directory gives a hint of what the show will look like. For example, while both levels of South Hall will be full, it will not be with the mix of large and small booths from recognizable exhibitors as in the past. Instead, the CES 2025 floor map shows hundreds of mostly small booths filled mostly by foreign companies with generic-sounding names.
Artificial intelligence will be a key topic at CES 2025, and, not surprisingly, one of the coveted CES keynote address slots will be filled by Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA. The chipmaker, best known for its game-friendly graphics chips, has grown to a multi-trillion-dollar corporation thanks to the explosive sales of its processors designed specifically for AI tasks.
“Speaking of AI,” said CTA President Kinsey Fabrizio during the press conference, “you are going to see innovations driving the next wave of discovery across the show floor from healthcare to mobility.”
Chipmakers Qualcomm, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel will also be at CES and may announce new AI-centric hardware for upcoming PCs or outline roadmaps for their AI-driven futures.
Missing from CES 2025 will be automakers like Ford and General Motors, but Honda, BMW and Scout Motors, a new automaker owned by Volkswagen which is channeling the spirit of the 1960s-era International Scout truck, have staked out exhibit space.
Sony Honda Mobility, a partnership of Sony Group Corp. and Honda Motor Co., is expected to announce an almost-ready-for-production version of the Afeela concept electric vehicle it has shown off at Sony’s huge booth at previous CES events. Many other auto-related companies like Waymo, which specializes in autonomous-driving technology and parts supplier Hyundai Mobis, which will be showing off a “holographic windshield display” and a “brainwave-based driver distraction care system,” will also be at CES 2025.
So, the question remains: Will thousands of small exhibitors attract attendees to CES as well as hundreds of larger ones? We’ll see soon. My tech tips appear regularly in Sree's Sunday Note.
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