# IFA 2026 Opens in Berlin With an Empty Samsung Booth and a Very Loud Chinese Answer By Rafiqul Islam Rabbi · Technology · Published Sun, 06 Sep 2026 09:00:30 GMT · Updated Sun, 06 Sep 2026 15:00:30 GMT Source: The Current Tribune — https://currenttribune.com/article/ifa-2026-berlin-samsung-xiaomi-ai-robots For 35 years, the surest way to orient yourself at IFA was to walk toward the Samsung sign. This year that sign isn’t there. The 102nd edition of Europe’s biggest consumer tech show opened at Messe Berlin on September 4 with its longest-serving anchor tenant conspicuously absent from the halls — and with Xiaomi, a company that had never once exhibited here, standing in almost exactly the space Samsung gave up. Five days, more than 1,900 brands, and a show floor that suddenly looks very different from what it did last September. ## The Empty Booth That Defined the Whole Show Apart from the scaled-down pandemic edition in 2020, this is the first time since Samsung’s 1991 debut that the company hasn’t staged a major exhibition at Messe Berlin. Instead, it built its own venue eight kilometres away in Berlin’s Mitte district, at the Humboldt Carré, and opened it on September 2, two days before IFA proper. The logic is familiar: Samsung pulled the same move at CES 2026, leaving the Las Vegas Convention Center for the Wynn. Do it once, and it’s an experiment. Do it twice in one year, and it’s a strategy. Samsung hasn’t vanished entirely — it still holds the IFA Creator Hub sponsorship on the grounds — but sponsoring a creator lounge and anchoring a show floor are not remotely the same thing. IFA boss Leif Lindner has been diplomatic about it in public, describing the arrangement as a compromise rather than an ideal. Retail voices have been blunter, pointing out the obvious problem: buyers who’ve flown in for a trade show generally don’t want to leave the trade show, ride across town, and ride back. ### What Samsung Showed Instead Credit where it’s due — the off-site lineup was dense. Samsung used the space to unveil flat-design 24-inch front-loaders, two Bespoke AI Washer engineering milestones, and the Odyssey G6, which it’s billing as the world’s first 1,100Hz gaming monitor. The washer can reportedly identify more than 3,000 product types, and the Galaxy S26 FE went on sale on opening day starting at $699. None of it caught the attention of the roughly 220,000 people wandering the halls. ## Xiaomi Turned Up and Bought the Room Xiaomi’s first appearance in IFA’s 102-year history landed in Hall 6.2 with more than 380 products spanning phones, appliances, EVs and robotics. The stand runs to 3,300 square metres — the company’s largest exhibition outside China — with everything stitched together by HyperOS under a “Human × Car × Home” banner. The ecosystem claim behind it is genuinely large: over 1.16 billion connected devices as of June 2026, excluding phones and laptops. Money backs the pitch. Xiaomi is committing €7.4 billion to AI research between 2026 and 2028, and it brought the SU7 Ultra and SU7 Max to Berlin ahead of a European car launch in 2027 with Germany first in line. The Vision Gran Turismo concept got prime placement, sharing floor space with air fryers, washing machines and vacuum cleaners — which is either absurd or exactly the point, depending on how you feel about ecosystems. The bigger context: 932 Chinese exhibitors turned up this year, the highest number IFA has ever recorded. That’s close to half the show. ## AMD Opened IFA, and the Headline Was Memory For the first time in the show’s history, AMD delivered the opening keynote — a talk from computing and graphics SVP Jack Huynh titled “The Era of Personal AI,” centred on the Ryzen AI Max Pro 400 series. Forget the branding. The number that matters is the memory pool. Spec Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 CPU 16 Zen 5 cores Graphics 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units NPU XDNA 2, up to 55 TOPS Unified memory Up to 192GB Usable as VRAM Up to 160GB Availability Shipping Q3 2026 The previous generation topped out at 128GB, and AMD claims the new part is the first x86 chip capable of running 300-billion-parameter models locally. Local inference is bottlenecked by memory far more than raw compute, so moving from 128GB to 192GB isn’t an incremental spec bump — it’s the difference between a model running on your desk and a model living on someone else’s server. Minisforum was already showing a compact workstation built on the top chip in Berlin, with Wi-Fi 7, dual 10GbE and Radeon 8060S graphics. ## Robots Stopped Being a Sizzle Reel The most watched event of the weekend was a catwalk. “Robots on the Runway” put humanoids from Unitree, DEEP Robotics and others in front of a crowd on September 5, and IFA’s chief executive noted the show has more humanoid robots this year than ever before, calling it a sign that robotics and new interfaces are working their way into everyday life. Europe’s entry is NEURA Robotics, which keynoted days after closing a $1.4 billion Series C — backed by Qualcomm, Amazon, NVIDIA, Bosch and the European Investment Bank — with an order backlog already north of $1 billion. IFA also programmed a session openly asking whether humanoid hype is substance or spectacle, which is a healthier instinct than most trade shows manage. On the domestic side, LG took Hall 18 with ThinQ Claw, a chat-based AI agent tied into its ThinQ ON hub that reads household context and routines instead of waiting for single commands, plus a 3,745-square-metre AI Home footprint and European appliances it says beat top A ratings by up to 70%. ## The Gadgets People Actually Queued For Away from the ecosystem theatre, the show floor delivered: - **Lenovo IdeaPad Vibe** — a genuinely affordable laptop in seven Pantone-developed colourways, with optional custom keycaps and a second SSD slot. - **Acer Project DualPlay Mini** — a handheld whose display swivels open into a tiny clamshell laptop. Concept only, sadly. - **Tecno’s bezel-less concept phone** — a working unit with a virtually borderless display and a 6,150mAh battery. - **Nvidia RTX Spark N1X** — confirmed for October in two variants, one roughly RTX 5070-class. - **TCL X11L** — up to 20,736 dimming zones and a claimed 10,000 nits, from $3,500. - **Circular Ring 3 Pro** — ECG, blood pressure and contactless payments in a smart ring, due early 2027. - **Luna Band** — a $150 screenless, subscription-free tracker finally shipping worldwide. - **RayNeo iO** — 33g titanium-and-magnesium smart glasses with an invisible waveguide and two days of use per charge. ## What This Means Samsung’s departure is being read as a snub to IFA. I’d argue it’s the opposite problem: Samsung decided a crowded hall was a distraction, and in doing so handed its biggest global rival an uncontested European stage during the exact week Europe’s retail buyers were all in one place. Xiaomi didn’t have to out-spend anyone. It just had to show up. The other shift is quieter but more durable. AI at IFA 2026 wasn’t a category — there was no “AI hall” — because it had dissolved into everything: the chip, the washing machine, the ring on your finger, the agent reading your kitchen. That’s what maturity looks like, and it’s also what makes this year’s show harder to summarise than any recent edition. The flashy part was the robots on the runway. The consequential part was a memory spec on a laptop chip and a Chinese ecosystem quietly taking a Korean company’s floor space. Berlin has always been where CES concepts turn into products with prices. This year it also became where the balance of power in consumer tech got visibly redrawn.