Every year, the tech industry descends on Taipei for Computex — basically the Super Bowl of gadget announcements. This year, two themes dominated everything else, and both of them will affect the next laptop or PC you buy.
AI is moving off the internet and onto your device
If you have watched or read our coverage of the Intel Core Ultra Series 3, you would have knew that the different tech companies are pushing for localised AI. You can check the video here. The article can be found here.
Right now, when you use an AI tool — like asking a chatbot a question or having software clean up your photos — it usually sends your request to a powerful computer somewhere far away, does the work there, and sends the result back to you. That requires a decent internet connection, costs money to run, and raises privacy questions about your data leaving your device.
What every major chip company announced at Computex is a push to change that. They want the AI to happen right inside your laptop — faster, more private, and working even when you’re offline. The race is on to make this work at every price point, from budget to premium.
NVIDIA + MediaTek — the premium play
These two companies teamed up to create a new chip that packs serious AI horsepower into a single piece of silicon. Think of it as a high-performance brain for your laptop. It’s an Arm-based chip that crams a 20-core Grace CPU and a Blackwell RTX GPU onto the same silicon. They’re putting this into premium gear like the new Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra so you can run heavy AI models entirely offline., letting you run powerful AI software entirely offline.
Intel — fighting for the middle
Intel fired back with new chips aimed squarely at everyday laptops under $500. They fired back with their Core 3 “Wildcat Lake” chips (built on their new 18A process). The whole goal here is to bring solid battery life and actual NPU power down to cheap, sub-$500 laptops and Chromebooks.
Qualcomm — the budget champion
Qualcomm introduced Snapdragon C chips, specifically designed to bring efficient, everyday Windows-on-Arm performance to dirt-cheap entry-level laptops.
The hardware enthusiasts still got their moment
Amid all the AI talk, the show floor still had some genuinely wild stuff for people who just love impressive technology for its own sake. Two things stood out.
ASUS ROG graphics card — completely unnecessary, completely brilliant
To celebrate 20 years of their ROG gaming brand, ASUS built a top-of-the-line graphics card and wrapped a curved OLED screen around the outside of it. You read that right — a screen on your graphics card. It serves no practical purpose whatsoever. It’s absurd. It’s wonderful.
ASUS ROG Xbox Ally — the handheld gets its glow-up
Handheld gaming PCs — like a Nintendo Switch but running full Windows games — have been growing in popularity. The new ROG Xbox Ally finally gets the OLED screen upgrade fans have been asking for, along with better joysticks and a cool retro see-through shell that shows the insides of the device.
Two very different directions, happening at the same time
Computex 2026 showed an industry pulling in two directions at once — and somehow making it work. On one side, companies are genuinely competing to bring smart AI features to the cheapest laptops on the market. On the other, they’re still building jaw-dropping, over-the-top gear for the people who just want the most powerful thing money can buy.
Whatever kind of tech person you are, something announced this week in Taipei is probably going to end up in your hands.
So, will you bother to buy a new PC just becuase you want to run your AI queries locally ?? Post your comments in our FB
https://www.facebook.com/ocworkbench