How Amazon and Nvidia won CES this year

This year's CES displayed a pretty broad mix in terms of production areas, with plenty of representation for categories ranging from wearables, to health, to VR and beyond – but the clear winners were two companies, and both succeeded primarily through partnerships than by direct demonstration of their own consumer products. Of the two, Nvidia had a much more direct presence; the GPU-maker's CEO Jen-Tsun Huang had the opening keynote, and packed a lot of news into the three-part presentation. Nvidia also had its own showfloor presences, including a self-driving car demonstration featuring BB8, its own test car, and an Audi Q7 equipped with the same software and hardware that could also drive itself, with no human behind the wheel. Nvidia's core business has become the core business of virtually every other tech company of size and significance; AI is one of, if not the primary area of interest and investment at Google, Facebook, Apple and others, and Nvidia's GPUs make it possible to create the neural nets and server systems that back machine learning, image recognition and other technologies under the broad AI umbrella. Meanwhile, Nvidia's consumer business is also making some big leaps.