Lisa Su, chair and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), displays an AMD EPYC “Venice” GPU during an AMD news conference ahead of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, on January 5, 2026.
Caroline Brehman/AFP via Getty Images
For the first time in 102 years, a silicon chip company will open the world’s largest consumer electronics show. AMD’s Jack Huynh, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Computing and Graphics, takes the Innovation Stage at Messe Berlin on September 4 at 11:00 AM local time (5:00 AM ET) for a keynote titled “The Era of Personal AI: The Future of Imagination” — and the chip industry’s presence in that slot is the clearest signal IFA 2026 has sent about where the AI race now lives: not in cloud data centers, not in smartphone cameras, but in the unified memory architecture of the PC sitting on a reader’s desk. Meanwhile, Samsung will be watching from eight kilometers (about five miles) away, having broken with 35 years of Messe Berlin tradition to host its own off-site experience at Humboldt Carré in central Berlin — the most structurally significant exhibition decision of the show.
The public show runs September 4 through 8 at Messe Berlin — 190,000 square metres (roughly 47 acres) across 27 exhibition halls — bringing more than 1,900 brands from 49 countries under the theme “The Future Is Now.” Tickets are priced at €21.50 (approximately $25 USD) online for adults and €28.00 (approximately $32 USD) at the door; children under 15 enter free. Trade visitor passes start at €65.00 (approximately $75 USD). Here is what to watch, day by day.
AMD’s Moment: Why a Chip Company Is Opening a Consumer Show
The question worth asking before the lights come up on Day 1 is why AMD — not a TV manufacturer, not a smartphone brand, not an appliance company — holds the opening keynote at Europe’s largest consumer electronics exhibition. The answer reveals how fundamentally AI has redrawn the competitive map.
AMD’s Ryzen AI Max Pro 400 series (codenamed Gorgon Halo) is positioned as the product that turns the “AI PC” from a marketing claim into a functional category. The flagship Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 pairs 16 Zen 5 CPU cores clocked at up to 5.2 GHz with 40 RDNA 3.5 graphics compute units and up to 192 GB of LPDDR5X-8533 unified memory — a single memory pool shared by the CPU, GPU, and NPU on the same die. That unified architecture is what makes on-device AI inference possible at this scale: a 70-billion-parameter language model that would overflow the VRAM of any discrete GPU can run entirely on-device, with no cloud round-trip, no latency penalty, no privacy exposure through an external server. The prior generation, the Ryzen AI Max 300 series, maxed at 128 GB — the same ceiling as NVIDIA’s DGX Spark. At 192 GB, the 400 series steps above both.
AMD has not officially confirmed that the IFA keynote is a Ryzen AI Max Pro 400 commercial launch event. What is confirmed is that systems from ASUS, HP, and Lenovo are targeting Q3 2026 availability — and September 4 falls in the final week of Q3. Industry analysts watching the IFA announcement have placed a Ryzen AI Max Pro 400 debut among the most probable outcomes of the morning. Seats in the Innovation Stage are first-come, first-served, and AMD has made the session open to both trade and consumer visitors. The keynote will also be livestreamed on AMD’s YouTube channel.
The significance runs deeper than a chip launch. When a silicon company — not a device OEM — sets the editorial frame for a consumer electronics week, it signals that the competition for what “AI” means in the home has migrated upstream to the processor level. Device makers at IFA 2026 are not competing primarily on industrial design or software experience; they are competing on which silicon they built their AI appliances around, and AMD’s presence on the opening stage is the industry acknowledging that fact out loud.
Samsung’s Absence: Breaking Thirty-Five Years of Messe Berlin Tradition
Samsung Electronics first exhibited at IFA in 1991 with a 43-square-metre booth at Messe Berlin that marked Korean consumer electronics’ European arrival. For 35 years — excepting the scaled-down 2020 pandemic edition — Samsung anchored the show, most recently operating an 8,700-square-metre City Cube space (6,000 sq m for product displays, 2,500 sq m for consultation).
That changes this week. Instead of a main-floor exhibition, Samsung has opened Samsung Connect — an immersive space at Humboldt Carré in Berlin’s Mitte district — and is running it from September 2 through 6, requiring an IFA trade pass on the official show days. Samsung Europe CMO Benjamin Braun framed the space around a “Companion to AI Living” vision, telling attendees that AI must deliver concrete benefits people can see and experience in their daily lives.
The Samsung Connect showcase includes a preview of upcoming Bespoke AI Washer models in compact 60-centimetre (about 24-inch) form factors capable of 10-kilogram (22-pound) and 13-kilogram (29-pound) loads, the newly announced Galaxy S26 FE, the new 14-inch Galaxy Book6, and three gaming monitor innovations described as industry firsts — including what Samsung describes as the world’s first 42-inch curved OLED gaming monitor. The marquee demonstration is the integrated kitchen pipeline: a Bespoke AI Family Hub refrigerator, connected oven, and AI-enabled dishwasher communicating as a single automated system — select a recipe on the fridge, the oven adjusts time and temperature, the dishwasher selects its cycle when cooking finishes.
The strategic logic mirrors what Samsung tested at CES 2026, where it moved to the Wynn Hotel rather than the Las Vegas Convention Center. Fewer attendees, longer looks, more controlled media engagements. Whether the trade-off is favorable — the collision with other exhibitors on the Messe Berlin floor was, for decades, part of how Samsung’s products reached retailers it hadn’t specifically invited — will be visible in European Q4 sell-through data. Samsung remains on-site as the official main sponsor of the IFA Creator Hub at the Palais am Funkturm, programming that space across all five show days.
Day 1 — September 4: AMD Opens, Policy Gets a Session, Robots Enter the Kitchen
AMD Opening Keynote: “The Era of Personal AI: The Future of Imagination” 11:00 AM local time (5:00 AM ET), Innovation Stage
Jack Huynh will open the show. Following the AMD IFA 2026 opening keynote, at 12:00 PM local time (6:00 AM ET), Germany’s consumer electronics trade body GFU will convene a policy session on the Innovation Stage examining the tension between fast-moving AI product launches and the EU AI Act’s entering enforcement phases. It is rare for IFA’s opening day to juxtapose a commercial launch with a regulatory critique — the pairing signals that the Brussels-to-Berlin policy distance is closing faster than the industry has priced in.
Robots in the Kitchen and Home: From Task-Specific Tools to Humanoids 1:15 PM local time (7:15 AM ET), Dream Stage, Hall 25
The afternoon session at the Dream Stage will examine what it would actually take for a humanoid robot to function reliably in a real home — not a demo environment. The session positions itself as a critical rather than promotional examination of where domestic robotics genuinely stands.
Miele Culinary Experience with Nilam Farooq 12:00 PM local time (6:00 AM ET), Hall 2.1 Booth 101
Miele, positioned in Hall 2.1, has anchored its entire IFA 2026 presence around the thesis that AI integration can eliminate rather than merely reduce the cognitive overhead of household chores — a claim the brand is staking commercially even as its Miele Performance Program reduced or relocated up to 2,700 positions worldwide under competitive pressure from lower-cost brands. German actress and content creator Nilam Farooq will lead a live cooking experience demonstrating how Miele’s AI-assisted dishwashers, cooking aids, washers and dryers, and cordless vacuums are designed to coordinate without requiring the user to manually program automation rules. Executive Director and Co-Proprietor Dr. Reinhard Christian Zinkann will participate in IFA’s stage program.
Pitch Battle: First Semi-Final 4:30 PM local time (10:30 AM ET), Dream Stage, Hall 25
IFA Next’s startup competition begins its first semi-final, with companies that have never previously exhibited at IFA now eligible to apply under a 2026 rule change. The competition is organized in collaboration with the German Start-up Association.
IFA Sommergarten Opening Night Berlin-based rapper Luciano performs at the IFA Sommergarten on the evening of September 4, reflecting IFA’s expanding ambition as a cultural event rather than a trade show with a side program.
Day 2 — September 5: Robots on a Runway, NEURA Keynote, Humanoid Hype on Trial
Saturday, September 5, is the most programmatically dense day of the show, stacking three major robotics moments in a single afternoon.
Miele Keynote: “The End of Housework Is in Sight: Innovating in the Age of AI” 11:00 AM local time (5:00 AM ET), Innovation Stage
Miele’s morning flagship session will expand on the brand’s IFA thesis with its full AI-integrated product pipeline: dishwashers that recommend cycle intensity based on meal context, washing machines that optimize programs using fabric recognition, and cooking systems that automate temperature and timing.
Robots on the Runway 12:45 PM local time (6:45 AM ET), Creator Stage
The show’s most theatrical moment arrives at 12:45 PM on the Creator Stage. “Robots on the Runway” — billed as an IFA first — will place humanoid robots, quadrupeds, and other robotic systems on a literal fashion-show catwalk to demonstrate movement, agility, and coordination in a live performance format. IFA program lists participant companies including Primebot Robots, EngineAI, Cozio Robotics, Dobot Robot, DEEP Robotics, Agibot, Unitree, ZBy – Mind with Heart, Ollobot, Astrall Dynamics, and AIMOGA. The roster is dominated by Chinese robotics firms — a reflection of the broader exhibitor composition at IFA 2026, where 932 Chinese companies now approach half of the show’s 1,900-plus exhibitors. The event closes with a meet-and-greet.
Sascha Pallenberg on the Humanoid Hype 1:15 PM local time (7:15 AM ET), Dream Stage
Almost simultaneous with Robots on the Runway, veteran tech analyst Sascha Pallenberg will take the Dream Stage for a session framed as a critical examination of whether the current humanoid robot wave represents engineering substance or investor-cycle spectacle. The back-to-back scheduling is IFA’s editorial acknowledgment that the excitement and the skepticism are equally present.
NEURA Robotics Keynote: “From Europe, for the World: Building the Ecosystem for Physical AI” 2:30 PM local time (8:30 AM ET), Innovation Stage
The afternoon’s headline moment belongs to David Reger, founder and CEO of NEURA Robotics, who will take the Innovation Stage for a keynote that arrives weeks after the company closed a Series C of up to $1.4 billion financing — the largest ever raised by a full-stack robotics company, according to the company’s announcement. Investors include Tether, Qualcomm Technologies, Amazon, NVIDIA, imec.xpand, Bosch, Schaeffler, and the European Investment Bank, with reporting placing the company’s valuation at approximately $7 billion.
Reger’s presentation will address the technical, commercial, and societal preconditions necessary for physical AI applications — robots that can perceive, learn, and operate in unstructured environments — to move from research into product. The argument NEURA wants to make in Berlin is specifically about European manufacturing and engineering: that the continent that built Bosch and Schaeffler can also build the infrastructure layer of the humanoid robot era, rather than importing it from Silicon Valley or Shenzhen.
NEURA’s technical differentiator is its Neuraverse platform — an operating system for physical AI in which skills learned by one robot propagate across the entire connected robot network, eliminating the need for unit-by-unit retraining. The concept functions, as the company describes it, like an app store where robots acquire capabilities without hardware modification. The company’s 4NE1 humanoid, which debuted at CES 2026 in a design collaboration with Studio F.A. Porsche, will be on show at the company’s IFA Next booth. The $1.4 billion round is contingent on NEURA hitting performance targets — the full amount is contingent on NEURA hitting internal performance targets — a structure that reflects how seriously major investors are taking the sector while still imposing accountability on delivery.
The Exhibitor Landscape: Korea Holds the Floor, China Fills It
While Samsung hosts off-site, LG Electronics has taken the opposite strategic approach, occupying Hall 18 at the center of the Messe Berlin floor with a large-scale AI Home Zone. LG is introducing two platform innovations at IFA 2026.
ThinQ Claw is a conversational text-chat AI agent built on LG’s OpenClaw architecture and integrated with Homey, a smart home platform from Dutch company Athom that LG acquired Athom in 2024. LG’s ThinQ Claw platform interprets user intent in the context of daily life rather than as isolated commands — coordinating cooking appliances, monitoring indoor air quality, managing schedules, and personalizing recommendations without requiring the user to program automation rules. The Homey integration provides Matter-based interoperability with third-party devices, meaning LG’s AI ecosystem can coordinate hardware from competing brands.
ThinQ Pro, making its European debut at IFA 2026, extends LG’s AI ecosystem into commercial and multi-family residential spaces — building management software positioned as LG’s B2B move alongside its consumer play.
TCL has booked all of Hall 21 under the theme “AI Inspired Life,” presenting its full product line from Mini LED screens and NXTPAPER mobile devices to RayNeo smart glasses and its upgraded NXTHOME smart home platform.
Hisense, whose European presence has grown through UEFA European Championship sponsorship, is positioned in Hall 23 as a direct competitor to LG in the premium TV and smart home space. Hisense’s September 3 press conference featured the Hisense RoamView S6 screen: a 31.5-inch (80 cm) 4K touch-enabled mobile smart screen with a 15,000 mAh battery rated for up to 10 hours of wireless use, alongside laser display technology and a new European sports sponsorship deal.
Xiaomi is making its formal IFA main show debut — occupying Hall 6.2 with a showcase themed “The Surging Wave of AI,” presenting the “Human × Car × Home” ecosystem across more than 380 products and formally introducing the Mijia smart home brand to European consumers for the first time in a large-format appliance context.
European heritage brands are defending their home market. BSH (Bosch, Siemens, Gaggenau, Neff) arrives at IFA in the middle of a painful restructuring — closing its Nauen plant in Brandenburg (approximately 440 jobs, production ending mid-2027) and its Bretten plant in Baden-Württemberg (approximately 980 jobs, production ending March 2028), a combined reduction of approximately 1,400 positions announced after the company cited persistently declining market demand and growing low-cost competition. Miele, which reduced or relocated up to 2,700 positions worldwide through its Miele Performance Program, is simultaneously positioning itself as the AI-integrated premium European benchmark.
The structural tension is real: two of Germany’s most prominent appliance brands are cutting jobs at German manufacturing sites under pressure from the same Chinese brands whose hall registrations at IFA 2026 approach half of the entire show’s exhibitor count.
Day 3 — September 6: AI-Update Live, Pitch Battle Finale
AI-Update — The Heise Podcast Live 3:00 PM local time (9:00 AM ET), Dream Stage, Hall 25
Germany’s leading technology publication, Heise, will bring its AI-Update podcast to the Dream Stage for a live recording — offering real-time editorial assessment of which AI product claims from the first two days hold up under scrutiny and which are marketing rather than engineering.
Pitch Battle Finale 5:00 PM local time (11:00 AM ET), Creator Stage
The IFA Next startup competition concludes on Sunday evening. Finalists from the semi-finals on September 4 and 5 will compete before judges and a live audience for the IFA Next Pitch Battle title.
Day 4 — September 7: AI in the Kitchen Under Scrutiny, and a Ten-Year Horizon
AI in the Kitchen: Helpful, Hype, or Harmful? 10:50 AM local time (4:50 AM ET), Dream Stage, Hall 25
This session, produced by food technology publication The Spoon, examines AI cooking assistants and whether smart kitchen appliances are genuinely improving meal preparation and nutrition — or whether they represent convenience technology that obscures food literacy and creates new dependencies. The question is deliberately pointed.
Future Home 2036: A Look at the Future of Smart Living 1:00 PM local time (7:00 AM ET), Dream Stage, Hall 25
The Home Connectivity Alliance session — whose membership spans Samsung, LG, Miele, Electrolux, and dozens of other brands — asks what a connected home will look like in 2036: which AI integrations will have become invisible infrastructure, which appliance categories will be disrupted, and whether smart home fragmentation will resolve into genuine interoperability or harden into platform silos. The ten-year horizon is unusual for a trade show discussion and signals IFA is positioning itself not just as a product launch venue but as an industry strategy forum.
Day 5 — September 8: Inclusion, Circular Economy, and the Agent-Ready Enterprise
Inclusion as Innovation 11:30 AM local time (5:30 AM ET), Creator Stage
The final day opens with a session examining how accessibility and inclusive design are shaping product development in consumer electronics — the commercial case for treating inclusion as a driver of innovation rather than a compliance requirement.
Fireside Chat: Back Market and the Circular Economy 12:30 PM local time (6:30 AM ET), Dream Stage, Hall 25
Back Market, the European marketplace for refurbished electronics, brings its EU Sellers Director Antoine Barbry to examine the tension between IFA’s role as a launch platform for new hardware and the growing regulatory and consumer pressure around repairability and right-to-repair legislation.
Make Your Company Agent-Ready: Context Is the New Code 1:45 PM local time (7:45 AM ET), Dream Stage, Hall 25
The penultimate flagship session of the show addresses the organizational challenge of integrating AI agents into enterprise workflows. The central argument: the bottleneck to AI adoption in 2026 is not model capability but context — companies that have not structured their data and internal knowledge for AI agents to access and act upon will be outcompeted by those that have. “Context is the new code” is the session’s organizing thesis.
IFA Next: Humanoid Robots and the Physical AI Zone
Hall 25 houses IFA Next, the show’s startup and emerging-technology zone, which in 2026 has been substantially reorganized around robotics and physical AI. Approximately 300 exhibitors are expected. Notable IFA Next participants include AGIBOT, DEEP Robotics, and Mind With Heart Robotics alongside European entrants and NEURA Robotics.
A RoboCup football tournament — in which university research teams compete with autonomous robots — runs across all five show days, providing a counterpoint to the commercial demonstrations elsewhere in Hall 25. Federal Minister Dorothee Bär serves as IFA Next patron.
Full Session Schedule at a GlanceDateTime (Berlin)Time (ET)SessionVenue
Sep 3
08:45
02:45
IFA Retail Leaders Summit
Palais am Funkturm
Sep 3
10:30
04:30
Xiaomi Press Conference
Hall 6.2
Sep 3
15:00
09:00
Hisense Press Conference
Innovation Stage
Sep 4
11:00
05:00
AMD Opening Keynote
Innovation Stage
Sep 4
12:00
06:00
Digital Policy (GFU)
Innovation Stage
Sep 4
12:00
06:00
Miele Culinary Experience
Hall 2.1
Sep 4
13:15
07:15
Robots in the Kitchen
Dream Stage
Sep 4
14:00
08:00
Samsung Panel Talk
Creator Stage
Sep 4
16:30
10:30
Pitch Battle Semi-Final 1
Dream Stage
Sep 5
11:00
05:00
Miele Keynote
Innovation Stage
Sep 5
12:45
06:45
Robots on the Runway
Creator Stage
Sep 5
13:15
07:15
Humanoid Hype? (Pallenberg)
Dream Stage
Sep 5
14:30
08:30
NEURA Robotics Keynote
Innovation Stage
Sep 5
15:30
09:30
Ronzheimer Live Podcast
Innovation Stage
Sep 5
16:30
10:30
Pitch Battle Semi-Final 2
Dream Stage
Sep 6
15:00
09:00
AI-Update — Heise Live
Dream Stage
Sep 6
17:00
11:00
Pitch Battle Finale
Creator Stage
Sep 7
10:50
04:50
AI in the Kitchen
Dream Stage
Sep 7
11:45
05:45
Creator Economy Live
Creator Stage
Sep 7
13:00
07:00
Future Home 2036
Dream Stage
Sep 8
11:30
05:30
Inclusion as Innovation
Creator Stage
Sep 8
12:30
06:30
Back Market Fireside Chat
Dream Stage
Sep 8
13:45
07:45
Make Company Agent-Ready
Dream Stage
How to Visit or Watch Remotely
Messe Berlin is at Messedamm 22, 14055 Berlin. Trade visitors are admitted from 9:30 AM to 6:00 PM on all days. Private visitors may enter from 12:00 to 6:00 PM on September 4 (Friday) and from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM on September 5 through 8 (Saturday through Tuesday). Families, school groups, and visitors with disabilities may enter from 10:00 AM on all days.
Adult tickets are €21.50 online for adults or €28.00 (approximately $32 USD) at the door; children under 15 enter free. Trade visitor passes start from €65.00 (approximately $75 USD) and include access to the Trade Visitor Lounge, IFA Global Markets (September 5–7, Hall 26 — a B2B sourcing event with 550-plus international suppliers), and exclusive networking events.
The AMD keynote on September 4 is the only opening-day session officially open to consumer-ticket holders without a trade pass. It will be livestreamed on IFA’s official channels and the AMD YouTube channel.
The Samsung Connect experience at Humboldt Carré in Berlin’s Mitte district closed to the general public after September 3 and is accessible only with a Samsung Connect trade pass during official show days September 4 through 6.
The full IFA 2026 program is searchable at ifa-berlin.com/programme.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat is the AMD IFA 2026 keynote expected to announce?
AMD has not officially confirmed specific product announcements for the September 4 “Era of Personal AI” keynote, which will be delivered by Jack Huynh, SVP and GM of Computing and Graphics. However, AMD’s Ryzen AI Max Pro 400 series — which features up to 16 Zen 5 cores, 40 RDNA 3.5 graphics compute units, and 192 GB of unified memory — was targeted for Q3 2026 commercial availability from systems from ASUS, HP, and Lenovo, placing the IFA keynote in the final window of that timeline. The 192 GB unified memory pool is the specific architectural detail that makes large on-device AI inference viable at a consumer price point: it allows AI models that would exceed any discrete GPU’s VRAM to run entirely locally, without cloud dependency.
Why did Samsung leave Messe Berlin after 35 years?
Samsung first exhibited at IFA in 1991 with a 43-square-metre booth, eventually building its City Cube presence to 8,700 square metres by the 2020s. For IFA 2026, the company has moved its flagship showcase to Humboldt Carré in central Berlin — approximately eight kilometres (about five miles) from the Messe Berlin fairgrounds — under a format it calls Samsung Connect. Samsung ran a similar strategy at CES 2026, hosting its showcase at the Wynn Hotel rather than the Las Vegas Convention Center. The stated rationale is a more controlled, immersive experience for media, retail partners, and B2B customers. Samsung remains on-site at Messe Berlin as the official main sponsor of the IFA Creator Hub at the Palais am Funkturm.
What is NEURA Robotics showing at IFA 2026?
NEURA Robotics will deliver the September 5 afternoon keynote at the Innovation Stage at 2:30 PM local time (8:30 AM ET), titled “From Europe, for the World: Building the Ecosystem for Physical AI.” CEO David Reger will present the company’s full-stack robotics platform, including the 4NE1 humanoid robot — which debuted at CES 2026 in a design collaboration with Studio F.A. Porsche — and will explain the Neuraverse platform, an operating system in which skills learned by one robot propagate across the connected robot network. NEURA’s record $1.4 billion Series C, announced June 10, 2026, is described by the company as the largest ever raised by a full-stack robotics company; backers include NVIDIA, Amazon, Qualcomm, Bosch, and the European Investment Bank.
Is IFA 2026 free to attend, and can I watch the AMD keynote online?
IFA 2026 is not free — adult tickets start at €21.50 purchased in advance online (approximately $25 USD) and €28.00 (approximately $32 USD) at the door; children under 15 enter free. Trade visitor passes begin at €65.00 (approximately $75 USD). The AMD opening keynote on September 4 is the one opening-day session officially open to consumer-ticket holders (seats are first-come, first-served) and will be livestreamed on IFA’s official channels and the AMD YouTube channel, making it available to readers who cannot attend in person.