Lenovo kicked off CES 2026 with a truly grand stage: the Las Vegas Sphere — a 366-foot-tall tech marvel with a four-football-field-wide wraparound screen and a 167,000-speaker sound system. The venue’s scale was not just dramatic; it mirrored Lenovo’s message that AI is becoming a platform layer that sits underneath everything.
What made the moment even more satisfying was that this was not symbolism alone. Behind the scenes, the Sphere’s mind-blowing visuals were powered by a dense cluster of Lenovo ThinkSystem high performance servers. Lenovo may be best known as the world’s largest PC maker by volume, but it has also become a powerhouse in high-performance computing and enterprise infrastructure. In other words: Lenovo is not just about devices — it builds the backbone that makes modern digital experiences possible.
Inside the Sphere, with 18,000 attendees surrounded by a 16K dome and sound that felt physical, Lenovo’s Chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang (“YY”) took the stage as a figure against a gigantic 270-degree digital canvas. The keynote felt less like a typical tech presentation and more like an immersive symphony — visuals choreographed across the dome, sound flowing through the hall, and live demos seamlessly composed with the confidence of a well-rehearsed presentation. It was a powerful metaphor: just as the Sphere’s systems work in concert to create something seamless, Lenovo’s Hybrid AI ecosystem is designed to harmonize devices, edge infrastructure, and platforms to deliver the vision of “Smarter AI for All.”
Inside the Sphere: A Vision Unfolds
When the lights dimmed and a galaxy of data and imagery swept across the dome, it was instantly clear this was not an ordinary keynote. Lenovo is a technology partner of Sphere Studios, meaning Lenovo’s own digital infrastructure help create and power the Sphere’s immersive content and production workflows. That detail matters, because it turns the Sphere from a flashy stage into a living proof point.
Supported by Lenovo’s digital infrastructure, the Sphere coordinates millions of LEDs, real-time audio, and complex production systems so precisely that the experience feels effortless. Lenovo’s Hybrid AI vision is built on the same principle: orchestration. Intelligence distributed across personal devices, edge servers, and digital platforms, coordinated so tightly that the user experience feels unified and immediate.
In YY’s framing, Hybrid AI securely brings together personal, enterprise and public AI models into one cohesive whole. The message was clear: AI is no longer confined to a single device, a single app or a single cloud. It is becoming ambient — an always-available layer that surrounds us, quietly connecting our devices and infrastructure like an intelligent symphony.
What stood out was how this orchestration mindset extends beyond the Sphere itself. Lenovo’s partnerships form a buzzing ecosystem that showcases Lenovo’s true end-to-end capability. This is showcase through collaborations with tech leaders such as AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm, leveraging on each of their strengths to build a collective whole that brings the capabilities of Lenovo’s products to a higher plane.
Lenovo’s partnership with organizations such as Formula 1 and FIFA similarly place Lenovo at the heart of environments where real-time data, global scale, and zero tolerance for failure are non-negotiable. These are not marketing tie-ups. They are live proving grounds where Lenovo’s high-performance hardware, resilient infrastructure, and mission-critical services are pushed to their limits under some of the most demanding conditions imaginable.
Crucially, the lessons learned on race weekends and tournament days do not stay there. They flow directly back into Lenovo’s enterprise portfolio — sharpening system design, hardening resilience, and elevating service delivery — so customers benefit from technology that has already been tested where failure is simply not an option.
Hybrid AI: Orchestrating Intelligence Everywhere
Lenovo’s CES announcements centered on Hybrid AI, and it landed strongly with the CIOs and tech leaders in the room because it speaks directly to the real enterprise problem: scaling AI without creating fragmentation, runaway cost, or unacceptable risk.
At its core, Hybrid AI is about uniting intelligence across three environments — personal devices, enterprise infrastructure, and the public cloud — into one secure strategy. Instead of AI being siloed in a phone app here or a data center there, Lenovo’s vision is “intelligent model orchestration” across every environment. In practice, that means an AI agent can dynamically tap the right resource for each task: a powerful cloud AI model when heavy AI processing is needed, or an on-device neural engine for instant, privacy-sensitive responses — automatically, without the user having to think about where the compute happens.
Lenovo CTO Tolga Kurtoglu described “intelligent model orchestration” as the backbone of any AI super-agent: the ability to access a pool of specialized models, select the best one for the user’s need in the moment, and optimize for low latency, high security, and cost efficiency. It’s an enterprise-friendly thesis: AI should be everywhere, but it should also be context-aware and optimized for where it runs.
CIOs I spoke with nodded at this vision because it maps to what they face every day: how to deploy AI widely without turning the environment into a patchwork of disconnected tools and uncontrolled data flows. Lenovo’s answer is a platform approach spanning end-user devices, edge servers, and core cloud, tied together with a unifying software stack — like an orchestra where every section plays at the right moment, without the audience ever seeing the conductor’s hand signals.
One AI Agent, Many Devices: Meet Lenovo Qira
A highlight of Lenovo’s CES showcase was Lenovo Qira, introduced as a personal AI “super-agent” designed to make “one AI, multiple devices” feel real. The key point was not that Qira is another assistant — it is positioned as a system-level ambient intelligence that lives consistently across Lenovo PCs, Motorola smartphones, tablets, AR glasses, and future wearables. Unlike legacy voice assistants that feel like separate apps you talk to, Qira is woven into the device experience itself. You don’t have to open it. It is meant to be there when you need it, everywhere you work.
Lenovo describes Qira through three core functions: Presence, Actions, and Perception.
- Presence means Qira is always available — invoked with a “Hey Qira” voice command or a dedicated hotkey — and designed to be pervasive but unobtrusive.
- Actions refers to Qira’s ability to act on your behalf by orchestrating tasks across apps and devices. In a live demo at a separate Lenovo event in Vegas, a Lenovo executive showed Qira in action — summarizing emails on a ThinkPad, scheduling a meeting via a simple voice prompt, and seamlessly handing off key summary notes for the user heading towards a meeting, with no manual file handling or device switching required. The message was clear: this is a shift from an assistant that responds to prompts to an agent designed to move work forward.
- Perception is what makes the whole concept sticky. Qira builds a personal knowledge model from the data you choose to share — documents, calendar, communications, and past interactions — so it can understand context, anticipate needs, and progressively become more helpful. Lenovo frames this as a “living model” of the user’s world, learning how you work, what matters to you, and what patterns define your day. In effect, Qira is meant to become a AI twin — a digital extension that handles routine tasks and surfaces the right information at the right moment.
Lenovo also stressed that Qira is built on a privacy-first hybrid AI architecture. In plain terms, it keeps as much processing on-device as possible so sensitive data does not always have to go to the cloud and only reaches out to cloud AI services when heavier compute is needed or when external information is required. User permission and control are designed in from the start: you explicitly choose what Qira can remember, and it ignores what you have not allowed. Visual indicators show when it’s listening or active, and the “memory” model is meant to be transparent and opt-in.
For IT leaders, Qira is a glimpse of how work might shift over the next few years: employees interacting with technology less by juggling apps, windows, and logins, and more through an agent that orchestrates work across devices. It’s a move from “AI as a tool” to “AI as a collaborator.” Lenovo even described Qira as “your own AI twin” that grows with you — empowering, a little uncanny, and undeniably compelling.
Gigascale AI: Lenovo and NVIDIA’s AI Gigafactory Vision
The conversation around scale reached its peak with Lenovo’s partnership with NVIDIA and the introduction of the AI Gigafactory concept. The idea is straightforward but ambitious: industrializing AI infrastructure deployment. Pre-engineered, fully validated racks of AI systems, designed to be deployed rapidly at massive scale, whether for cloud providers or large enterprises building private AI environments. Instead of months-long integration cycles, Lenovo’s vision is plug-and-play AI factories — built to scale rapidly, executed with agility for customers. This is where Lenovo’s manufacturing depth, global logistics, and end-to-end support capabilities become strategic differentiators.
The implication was clear: whether it is an AI cloud, a mission-critical enterprise deployment, or a venue that demands absolute reliability at massive scale, Lenovo intends to be the backbone.
From Spectacle to Strategy
As the keynote concluded and the lights came back up, it was hard not to feel that this marked a genuine inflection point. Hybrid AI, as Lenovo presented it, is not about replacing cloud or devices — it’s about orchestrating both, intelligently and securely.
For enterprise leaders, the opportunity is enormous: AI that accelerates decisions at the edge, personal agents that reduce digital friction, infrastructure that scales without breaking governance models. The challenges are real too — skills, trust, change management — but Lenovo’s message was clear: the tools, platforms, and partners are ready.
Walking out of the Sphere, with senses still buzzing, one parallel stuck. The Sphere’s tagline is “You’ve got to see it to believe it.” Lenovo’s CES showcase took that literally. It didn’t just explain a future — it let you experience a slice of it. And if this is what Hybrid AI looks like at launch, the next few years are going to move very fast.
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