CES 2025: What Is the Huge Tech Show and What Trends Do Experts Predict?

CNET is going to Las Vegas and we’re taking you with us. Many of you will be enjoying a slow start to the new year, but we’re diving headfirst into 2025 with our first destination: CES, the big kahuna of technology shows. From wild robots to next-generation cars to cutting-edge TVs, we’ll be getting up close and personal with the tech that will define the next year of our lives.

What is CES? 

CES, which formerly stood for Consumer Electronics Show, is one of the largest technology-focused trade conferences in the world. It takes place every year in Las Vegas, Nevada and is attended by most major tech companies including Samsung, Sony, LG, Google, Meta, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm and Lenovo, as well as car makers like Honda, Volvo BMW and Waymo, satellite telecom companies like Iridium, Globalstar and SpaceX’s Starlink, and thousands of other exhibitors. Last year CES drew more than 135,000 attendees according to the CTA, the industry group that hosts the show.

Read more: Best Press Events, Conferences and Trade Shows, Rated by CNET

Many of the products we’ll see at CES will be concepts — high-tech ideas that have been brought to life but that are still works in progress that may or may not make it into the real world as finished products. There will also be plenty of devices available for you to buy either immediately or in the near future. We’ll let you know what they are and whether they’re worth your hard-earned cash.

When is the conference?

The official dates for CES 2025 are Jan. 7 to 10, but we’ll arrive in town a few days before that for an early look and exclusive press-only previews before the show doors even open. Some side events are scheduled as early as Saturday, Jan. 4. Monday, Jan. 6, is a day of back-to-back press conferences, where the biggest names in tech will unveil their latest products and devices to the world.

How to watch CES

The best place for all the latest CES news is right here at CNET. Our expert team of reporters and reviewers has decades of combined experience covering the show. We’re committed to showing you everything we deem interesting and important, and we won’t just be admiring new products from afar. We’ll be touching them, tinkering with them and trying not to drop them, so be sure to follow us across X (formerly twitter), TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Bluesky, too.

This year CNET is teaming up with our sister Ziff Davis publications ZDNET, PCMag, Mashable and Lifehacker to present the official Best of CES Awards. Our editors and experts will crown winners across a range of categories and name one of them the Best Overall product or service at CES 2025. Winners will be announced on Jan. 9 and we’re taking submissions now.

Watch this: Best of Show: The Coolest Gadgets of CES 2024

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CES 2025 predictions

At CES 2024 we saw exciting tech trends emerge, from transparent screens to new solutions to take your house off the grid. We’re back for another year to see how those trends have evolved in the intervening 12 months, as well as what’s new for 2025. These are what we expect to be the defining themes of the show.

AI and its agents 

AI was everywhere at CES 2024, and while there were some cool examples of the fast-moving technology, there was also a lot of empty hype. At CES 2025, we’ll be looking for clear evidence that AI is making a difference to any products it’s embedded in and isn’t just lending itself to a label on a box or another bullet point on a spec sheet.

At this year’s show, we expect to hear plenty about “agentic AI,” which will put smart assistants at the forefront of device interfaces. It’s an idea that’s been heavily hinted at by tech companies, and it’s even the subject of experiments, in ways that suggest it could eventually kill off apps. It has yet to be executed in a way that makes us convinced it’ll be the future.

We could be taken by surprise by more standalone AI devices. At CES 2024, the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin unexpectedly stole the show but later failed to live up to the promise. More likely we will see AI integrated into existing products, from TVs to phones to snowblowers to toothbrushes. 

Last year we saw the emergence of Copilot Plus PCs with dedicated AI buttons, and we expect to see more this year. Samsung with its “screens everywhere” strategy will be packing AI into its new washer and dryer, as well as its wall oven. LG, meanwhile, is putting AI sensing tech into cars to “detect and respond to the needs of vehicle occupants while optimizing conditions within the cabin.”

Hot new chips

As much as you go to CES hoping to see the leaps and bounds in technology, you also go with the awareness that many products will represent the next generation of what you know already. These improvements can’t happen without the work of chipmakers, who design the tech that boosts the performance and power of our most-used devices.

At this upcoming CES, we expect both Nvidia and AMD to announce new chips, and for the companies they partner with to unveil devices with those chips inside. For Nvidia, this is likely to mean Acer, Asus, Razer, Lenovo and Dell. 

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will kick off the show with a keynote address in which he’s expected to make announcements about the company’s next-generation CPUs and GPUs, which will likely be good news for the laptop gamers among us. Already the company has teased its GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs online, and more details appeared in a leak regarding Acer Predator Orion PCs.

Meanwhile, AMD has already confirmed that we’ll see RDNA 4 GPUs at the show. As for Qualcomm, the company had its big annual launch event back in October, but it usually keeps something up its sleeve for CES.

Car tech in the fast lane

Over the past decade, cars have increasingly nudged their way onto center stage at CES. EVs are one of the hottest categories in tech, and CES 2025 will showcase the latest in futuristic electric vehicles and transportation concepts.

A number of top automakers will be at CES again this year, unveiling everything from infotainment system updates to brand-new EVs. Hyundai is set to show off the world’s first full-windshield holographic display, which will span from the driver’s seat to the front passenger seat, while BMW is set to debut its Panoramic iDrive display. Honda has already teased two sleek prototype 0 Series electric vehicles, which it will unveil at the show.

Traditional tech companies are also looking for a slice of the auto pie, with Sony rumored to be showing off the Sony-Honda Afeela car with a built-in PS5. Powering much of the next-gen car tech are chip companies such as Qualcomm, which will likely have updates of its own to announce at the show.

On the mobility side of the industry, Waymo, which just announced the international expansion of its autonomous vehicles to Tokyo, is set to outline its vision for the future in an exclusive keynote session.

CNET’s expert predictions

Many of CNET’s seasoned technology experts will be on the ground in Vegas, ready to embrace the weird, wacky and wonderful. For most of us, this isn’t our first rodeo, and we’re heading into the show with high expectations. Here are some of our predictions:

David Katzmaier — Editorial Director, Personal Tech
I’ve been attending CES and reviewing TVs for more than 20 years, and this show is the Super Bowl for screens. At CES 2025 I expect to see bigger TVs than ever, likely topping last year’s champ, the 115-inch TCL. My favorite TVs are the wacky concepts on the bleeding edge of usefulness versus cool (veering toward the latter), like LG’s Transparent TV and C-Seed’s $200K folding Micro-LED TV. CES is also where I see newfangled, nerd-worthy display tech that surprises even this jaded reviewer, like rollable TVs, flippable phones, electroluminescent quantum dots, cutting-edge VR and displays inside a contact lens. My fingers are crossed that CES 2025 blows my mind again with some unexpected future TV tech!

Lisa Eadiccico — Senior Editor, Mobile
This will be my seventh CES, and just like in years past, I’m expecting to see wild concepts (like flexible phone screens that bend in different directions); new wearables that measure your health in different ways; and lots of screens everywhere, from the kitchen to the car. I think artificial intelligence, which has officially been the tech buzzword of the last two years, will continue to dominate the show in 2025. Last year, we got a taste of how companies are infusing AI into everything from new handheld devices to cars and home robots, but the technology is bound to be even more of a focus this year. The challenge will be cutting through the hype to find the products that are actually using AI to meaningfully improve how their offerings work rather than just using the term to boost their marketing.

Eli Blumenthal — Senior Editor, Mobile
I’ve lost track of how many CES shows I’ve been fortunate enough to attend, but I fully expect to be intrigued by plenty of crazy concepts, many of which will almost assuredly not materialize into products we can buy in 2025 (or buy at an affordable price anyway). Last year we saw wild ideas for a color-changing BMW and an electric air taxi from Hyundai, to go with rollable and transparent micro-LED screens from Samsung. 

Were any of these things readily available for consumers in 2024? No, but that’s not always the point. To me, CES has become a way to peek behind the R&D curtains to see what some of the world’s biggest tech companies are up to. Although these concepts may not be ready for finished devices or store shelves just yet, they give us a chance to see what’s coming. I expect this year’s show will be no different, with lots of crazy concept cars, higher quality or larger rollable and foldable displays, and plenty of products fully immersed in abbreviations like AI, AR and VR.

Katie Collins — Senior European Correspondent
As for me, I’ve spent many a CES playing with robots — whether that be ping-pong or Cards Against Humanity — and I’m excited to see what droids I can befriend this year. What I’m really hoping to see is some of the progress that’s been made toward embedding AI into robots in ways that can help them transition out of the show and into the real world, ideally into our homes. It’s a jump they’ve long struggled to make. I’m also excited to see how developments in health and beauty tech can empower us to take more control over our wellness — for example, using AI to help diagnose and treat skin conditions. I’ll be keeping a close eye out too for the companies that are using tech to improve sustainability and accessibility. Plus, I know Delta’s keynote event at the Las Vegas Sphere is going to be a highlight of the show for me.

One of the best things about CES is that despite our years of experience and our deep industry contacts, the show always manages to surprise us with something weird and wacky we never saw coming. So be sure to follow our coverage right here at CNET for the latest, as we kick off another high-tech new year. See ya soon in Vegas.