Dansday
IFA ran at Messe Berlin from 4 to 8 September 2026, its 102nd year, with more than 1,900 brands on the floor. The halls were full. The story was who was not in them.
For the first time in 35 years, Samsung did not take a stand in the Messe. It held its own event off-site instead. In the same week, Xiaomi took a booth at IFA for the very first time, and roughly half the exhibitor list was Chinese. That is the whole shift in two sentences — the show did not shrink, it changed hands.
AMD opened proceedings with a keynote titled The Era of Personal AI, delivered by Jack Huynh on the Innovation Stage. The framing was consistent across the week: not AI in a data centre you rent time on, but AI running on the thing sitting in front of you.
Anker's MindBase was the clearest expression of it — a local AI hub that keeps the model and the data in your house rather than on somebody's rented GPU. Whether that is a genuine trend or a pitch that tests well in a year of subscription fatigue is not yet obvious, but a lot of companies made the same bet at the same time.
Glasses were the most crowded category. RayNeo's GT Max claimed the first AR glasses with Dolby Vision, from $329, while the RayNeo iO went the other way — 33 grams, no camera at all, which quietly removes the single thing that has made every previous pair socially unwearable. Xreal showed the Aura alongside them.
Elsewhere: the Xiaomi 18 Fold, a TECNO concept phone with no bezel on any side, TCL's NXTPAPER panel moving to AMOLED, the Moto Watch Ultra at £369, and XGIMI's Aura 3 Max, billed as the first ultra-short-throw laser TV to do 4K at 120Hz.
None of that is a single headline product. IFA rarely produces one. What it produces is a snapshot of what a few thousand companies independently decided was worth building this year, and this year they decided it was local AI and something to wear on your face.
Samsung's absence will be read as a verdict on trade shows. It is probably simpler than that — when you are large enough, the show is a cost, and when you are arriving, it is the cheapest room you will ever get.