CES 2026 News: NVIDIA Hails the Beginning of Reasoning AI Models

This week, at CES 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang appeared in his trademark leather jacket to deliver a keynote. He has high hopes for AI, a movement NVIDIA is spearheading. 

"Computing has been fundamentally reshaped as a result of accelerated computing, as a result of artificial intelligence," he said. "Hundreds of billions of dollars, a couple hundred billion dollars in VC funding each year is going into modernizing and inventing this new world ... A hundred trillion dollars of industry, several percent of which is R&D budget, is shifting over to artificial intelligence."

In his keynote, Huang put the spotlight on two areas: physical AI, or AI that understands the laws of physics; and the open-source movement in AI. "AI is going to proliferate everywhere when open source and innovation across every single company and every industry around the world is activated. Open models really took off last year. In fact, last year we saw the advance of DeepSeek R1, the first open model that's a reasoning system," he noted.

Up to now, most AI programs simply operate as data retrieval tools, augmented by natural language comprehension. But reasoning takes the technology to a new height. Huang explained, "The reasoning capability of agents open doors to all of these different applications. We no longer have to train an AI model to know everything on day one, just as we don't have to know everything on day one. That we should be able to in every circumstance reason about how to solve that problem."

The ChatGPT Moment for AV Development

At the event, NVIDIA announced Alpamayo, a family of open-source AI models and tools for autonomous vehicle (AV) development. According to the announcement, "The Alpamayo family introduces chain-of-thought, reasoning-based vision language action (VLA) models that bring human-like thinking to AV decision making." 

“The ChatGPT moment for physical AI is here -- when machines begin to understand, reason, and act in the real world,” said Huang. 

NVIDIA describes the offering as "large-scale teacher models that developers can fine-tune and distill into the backbones of their complete AV stacks." The Alpamayo sits on three pillars: open models, simulation frameworks, and datasets. 

Open Models: Alpamayo 1 is a chain-of-thought reasoning VLA model designed for the AV research community, delivered via the Hugging Face open-source portal. It uses video input to generate trajectories alongside reasoning traces, showing the logic behind each decision.

Simulation Frameworks: AlpaSim is an open‑source simulation framework for high‑fidelity AV development, delivered via GitHub. It includes sensor modeling, configurable traffic dynamics, and scalable closed‑loop testing environments.

Datasets: Through Hugging Face, NVIDIA is offering an open dataset for AV that contains 1,700+ hours of driving data collected across a wide range of geographies and conditions, covering rare and complex real-world edge cases. 

“The launch of the Alpamayo portfolio represents a major leap forward for the research community,” said Wei Zhan, codirector of Berkeley DeepDrive. “NVIDIA’s decision to make this openly available is transformative as its access and capabilities will enable us to train at unprecedented scale — giving us the flexibility and resources needed to push autonomous driving into the mainstream.”

NVIDIA launches Alpamayo, a set of Physical AI models for autonomous vehicle developers. Image courtesy of NVIDIA.

A Firmer Handshake with Siemens

Huang also appeared on stage alongside Siemens CEO Roland Busch, signaling a stronger partnership between NVIDIA and Siemens. The press announcement from NVIDIA called the gesture "a significant expansion of their strategic partnership to bring artificial intelligence into the real world."

“Together, we are building the Industrial AI operating system -- redefining how the physical world is designed, built and run -- to scale AI and create real-world impact,” said Busch.

The companies plan to develop industrial and physical AI solutions to inject AI-driven features into the industry and industrial workflow -- Siemens' domain for industrial digital twins. To realize this, NVIDIA will provide AI infrastructure, simulation libraries, models, frameworks, and blueprints.

NVIDIA's partnership with Siemens took roots in 2022, when Siemens decided to integrate NVIDIA Omnivere-powered visualization features and digital twin functions into the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio. Siemens also plans to complete GPU acceleration across its entire simulation portfolio to support NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries and physics models.

At the show, Siemens also revealed a Digital Twin Composer, a new software for building Industrial Metaverse environments. 

NVIDIA and Siemens announce an expansion of their partnership to bring AI to industrial digital twins. Image courtesy of NVIDIA.