Trade visitors were let in at half past nine on Friday morning, and the public had to wait until noon, which gave the halls two and a half hours of the particular quiet that only exists at a trade fair before the crowds arrive. Forklifts still moving. Someone testing a soundbar at a volume nobody would choose later in the day. By eleven the seats in front of the Innovation Stage were full, and the 102nd edition of the Internationale Funkausstellung began the way no previous edition ever had: with a chip company.
Jack Huynh, who runs computing and graphics at AMD, gave the opening keynote. The title was “The Era of Personal AI: The Future of Imagination,” and the argument underneath it was less abstract than the title suggests. AMD used the slot to talk about the Ryzen AI Max Pro 400 series, which supports up to 192GB of unified memory, of which as much as 160GB can be addressed as video memory. The previous generation stopped at 128GB. Nvidia’s DGX Spark, a machine built specifically for local AI development, also stops at 128GB. The claim AMD is making with that number is that a 300-billion-parameter model can now run on a laptop, without a network connection, which until this year meant a rack. The neural unit is rated at 55 TOPS, throughput on language models is up by half against the 300 series, and the parts ship this quarter.
Whether the demos live up to that is a question for the review cycle in a few weeks. What matters at Messe Berlin is the placement. IFA has spent a century as a show about televisions, radios, washing machines and, more recently, phones. Putting silicon in the opening slot is a statement about which layer of the stack the organisers think the story now sits on.
The Empty Hall
The bigger statement was made by a company that isn’t here.
For the first time since 1991, Samsung has no large exhibition on the Messe grounds. It is running its own event at the Humboldt Carré in central Berlin, about eight kilometres away, which opened on 2 September, two days before IFA itself. The logic is the one Samsung applied at CES in January when it left the Las Vegas Convention Center for the Wynn: fewer people through the door, longer with each of them, and complete control over the room. Media briefings, retail meetings and launches all in one building.
IFA’s chief executive, Leif Lindner, described the arrangement as a compromise, which is the politest available word for it. Benedict Kober of Euronics was blunter in public, saying he had told Samsung directly that retailers would not leave the fairgrounds to travel across the city and come back. Samsung is still on site as the sponsor of the Creator Hub at the Palais am Funkturm, a studio built for streamers and influencers. Sponsoring a stage and anchoring a hall are different kinds of presence.
The timing produced an odd result on Friday. The Galaxy S26 FE went on sale, at $699, and most of the reporters writing that story were standing in a hall Samsung had vacated, within walking distance of everything its competitors had brought.
Hall 6.2
The space Samsung gave up went to Xiaomi, which is exhibiting at IFA for the first time in the show’s history and did not hold back. Roughly 3,300 square metres in Hall 6.2, more than 380 products, and a single organising idea printed on everything: Human × Car × Home. The connective tissue is HyperOS, which Xiaomi says now runs on 1.16 billion devices, built by a team of more than five thousand engineers and extended across two hundred-odd product categories.
The stand does the thing a good stand does, which is make an abstraction physical. You walk past a phone, then a rice cooker, then an SU7 Ultra, and the pitch about a unified session across devices stops being a slide. The 18 Fold is there in cherry red, with the company’s 3nm XRing O3 inside it, technically a week early. The SU7 Ultra and SU7 Max are making their European physical debut; Xiaomi has delivered over 650,000 cars in China since March 2024 and intends to start selling in Germany by 2027. Behind all of it sits a €7.4 billion AI research commitment covering 2026 through 2028, a figure the company put on the table at the IFA kick-off in June and has repeated since.
The number that frames the whole floor, though, is 932. That’s how many of this year’s exhibitors are Chinese companies, out of somewhat more than 1,900 total from 49 countries. Nearly half. The robotics roster reads the same way, with Unitree, Agibot, DEEP Robotics, EngineAI, Dobot and others, and Germany’s NEURA Robotics carrying much of the European side on its own.
Elsewhere on the Grounds
Lenovo took the colour approach, filling its space with IdeaPad Vibe laptops and IdeaCentre all-in-ones in a full spectrum of finishes, keyboards and mice matched to each. The Vibe keycaps come off; you buy packs separately and there’s a puller in the box. Quietly more interesting on the same stand is the ThinkVision P27UL-40, a monitor built with TCL CSOT’s inkjet-printed OLED process, which has been a manufacturing story for about a year and is now a thing you can order. TCL itself has all of Hall 21A under the banner “AI Inspired Life,” with its NXTHOME platform, NXTPAPER devices and RayNeo glasses.
At noon, German federal digital minister Dorothee Bär shared the Innovation Stage with Miele’s Reinhard Christian Zinkann for a session on the country’s digital agenda, in German, moderated by Pinar Atalay. A floor away, the new Retail Innovation Zone opened with TikTok Shop’s Moses Tan telling trade visitors that consumer electronics brands need to treat the platform as a primary sales channel; AliExpress has a keynote in the same room later in the week. One session was titled “The Algorithmic Shopper,” on what happens to product discovery when the shopper is a piece of software. That the show built a permanent zone for this, running all five days, says something about where IFA thinks its own commercial future is.
The awards ceremony ran at half past two, the first semi-final of the IFA Next pitch battle at half past four, and Luciano played the Sommergarten in the evening. Attendance over the five days is expected at around 220,000, spread across 27 halls, with 270 speakers and 125 sessions.
Saturday is the denser day. Humanoid robots from Unitree, Agibot, DEEP Robotics, EngineAI and Dobot walk a catwalk on the Creator Stage at quarter to one, and at the same time Sascha Pallenberg is on the Dream Stage with a session called “The Humanoid Hype: Substance or Spectacle?” Scheduling those against each other looks deliberate. NEURA’s David Reger follows at half past two, three months after closing a $1.4 billion Series C backed by Qualcomm, Amazon, Nvidia, Bosch and the European Investment Bank, with an order book he says already exceeds a billion dollars.
The theme this year is “The Future Is Now.” On day one it mostly meant that the AI conversation has moved off the keynote slides and into the memory controller, the appliance ecosystem and the checkout.