The Breaking of the Ice: How Tech Companies Are Taking Over the World, Seen from CES 2026

Today I arrived in Las Vegas. For my first meal, I went to Z Taste of Chengdu to have Sichuan cuisine. It has a 4.6 rating on Dianping. The chili oil is authentic, and the spiciness is just right. It's extremely authentic. Amidst the spiciness in a foreign land, I could smell a similar kind of hot and bustling atmosphere.

This year's CES (Consumer Electronics Show) has expanded to an astonishing scale: a 300,000-square-meter exhibition area, with over 4,500 exhibitors, and I've received more than 100 invitations from various companies in my email.

I first attended CES in 2018. At that time, the essence of CES was a traditional "Home Appliance and Mobile Phone Expo" - Skyworth, TCL, and Hisense were competing to see whose TV screens could be thinner, and Huawei and Xiaomi were vying for better mobile phone pixels. Eight years have passed, and CES has completely changed.

From the Edge to the Center: The Breaking of the Ice Surface

At this year's CES, AMD CEO Lisa Su will deliver the first major keynote speech on the evening of January 5th, unveiling a new lineup of Ryzen chips, focusing on "Full-Stack AI Computing from the Cloud to the Edge".

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, although not an official keynote speaker at CES, is still one of the absolute protagonists.

On the same day as Lisa Su takes the stage, he will host the "NVIDIA Live" event, revealing Nvidia's latest progress in the AI field in advance.

Chinese manufacturers are also very active. Geely and Great Wall are bringing their latest autonomous driving platforms and making a strong entry into the core area of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Dreame and Roborock are bringing in the giants of embodied intelligence and whole-home intelligent control, turning robots from "tools" into "butlers".

Behind the hustle and bustle of CES, technology companies are in the process of comprehensively "breaking the ice" in the global economy.

In the past, the traditional economy was like a thick ice surface. Core industries such as finance, manufacturing, and energy were at the center of the ice surface, and technology companies could only operate at the edge, making some consumer-level innovations. But in recent years, technology companies have begun to directly break through to the center of the ice surface:

Cars are no longer just mechanical: The mechanical structure has degenerated into a hardware carrier, and OTA (Over-the-Air) has become the soul of cars. Software-defined cars have become an established rule in the industry.

Retail is no longer just about containers: AI Agents have taken over the supply chain and consumer decision-making. Traditional supermarkets seem like faltering old people in the face of precise algorithmic predictions.

Finance is no longer just about vaults: Tech giants hold the most real data streams and credit evaluations. Their penetration into the financial industry is a structural subversion.

This "ice-breaking" is directly reflected in the power structure of the capital market.

At the beginning of 2026, the dominance of the "Big Seven Tech Giants" in the US stock market reached its peak. The market value of just three companies, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple, reached 12 trillion US dollars. They have become the foundation of the global economy.

The Collapse of the Power Balance: The "Golden Age" of Founders

It's not just the giants that are expanding; the growth logic of startups is also changing dramatically. Thanks to the maturity of large models and cloud infrastructure, the costs of building products and acquiring customers have been significantly reduced.

The most typical example is Manus. In just nine months, its valuation soared to 3 billion US dollars, and by the end of 2025, it fell into Meta's embrace.

This has changed the power balance in the capital market. In the past, founders would beg for investment from VCs. Now, even top VCs may not be able to meet top founders.

When a talented team can leverage a market worth billions of dollars with a computing power cost of just tens of millions of dollars, capital is no longer scarce. The smartest young talents are the scarce resources of this era.

This explosion of wealth creation was clearly verified in the "Hurun Rich List 2025" a few days ago. Entrepreneurs in "new quality productivity" sectors such as new energy, AI, and biomedicine accounted for 60% among the top 100.

This wealth is highly concentrated in the most dynamic regions of China: the Greater Bay Area and the Yangtze River Delta.

Cultural Shift: From "Emotional Literature" to "Rational Creation"

This ice-breaking is not only on the economic level but also on the cultural level.

When we were kids, the mainstream culture was "literary", represented by Jin Yong and Qiong Yao, a mixture of flowery words and excessive sentimentality.

But now, "tech culture" is spreading globally. It's a culture that yearns to explore the world and create things with one's own hands. It combines science fiction, games, and the lifestyle of programmers and is becoming a global universal value.

Today's young people no longer discuss "the subtleties of words". Instead, they talk about "model parameters", "embodied intelligence", and "mars colonization".

This "creator culture" is completely overwhelming the "literary culture". Those old-fashioned, emotional, and illogical forms of emotional expression are becoming outdated, replaced by efficiency, logic, and a rational pursuit of science.

When tech giants control most of the social wealth, their aesthetics and values become the mainstream of this era.

Conclusion

At the venue of CES 2026, we can hear the faint and dense cracking sounds of the old economic ice surface.

This is no longer just a "consumer electronics" exhibition but a coronation ceremony for tech giants. Looking to the future, AI will step out of the screens and inhabit the bodies of every robot and mobile terminal.

When the carbon-based sentiment is reconstructed by silicon-based rationality, the world is entering a new era defined by tech giants.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Tech Daily Push" (ID: apptoday). Author: Tech Daily Push. Republished by 36Kr with permission.