Plus: Dell’s PC business seeks a comeback; At CES, physical AI steps on the gas with announcements from Boston Dynamics, Robert Bosch and Nvidia.

Good morning. AI innovation is accelerating, further testing the leadership capacity of companies already struggling to keep pace with a changing environment.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Monday that the company’s next-generation AI server platform, Vera Rubin, is now in "full production," unveiling the milestone at the CES show in Las Vegas. (Much more on chips and CES below)

Faster, stronger, better. “Usually, Nvidia details the specs and capabilities of its latest chips at its spring developer conference in Silicon Valley,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “This year, Huang said, the complexity of computing required by AI and the immense demand for advanced processors to train and operate models has prompted the semiconductor industry to move faster.”

Now, a thinking process. “Multiple paradigm shifts in computing are behind the surge in demand,” Huang said. Inference, or the process by which AI models respond to user prompts, “is now a thinking process,” and new models need to be trained on increasingly immense amounts of data.

Nvidia refers to the next phase of AI as the “omniverse,” a type of model-training that allows AI to use simulations of reality to learn how to navigate real-world situations such as autonomous driving.

Fewer chips, lower inference costs. Nvidia said it tested the system for models with up to 10 trillion parameters. With Rubin GPUs, developers can train such models in a month using one-quarter the chips required by Blackwell, Nvidia’s previous generation of GPUs, while inference costs fall by a factor of 10.

As the price-performance of AI computing improves, so will model performance. That’s going to unlock all sorts of new capabilities for companies in areas such as physical AI and robotics. But company leaders will have to adapt to an ever-faster pace of change, assessing the business case for staying on the cutting-edge of technology, and figuring out how to get optimal value out of newer as well as older, depreciating assets.

Company leaders will have to accelerate the pace of the decision-making process in an increasingly complex and high-stakes environment. That means they will have to learn to synthesize information at an increasingly faster pace while improving the quality of their forecasts.

The take-away for tech leaders: Leaner, more collaborative, data-driven multidisciplinary teams must be the order of the day as the pace and intensity of technological change accelerates.

Making a comeback in technology is always hard. Microsoft did it, IBM did it (by shifting to services) and now Dell Technologies is aiming to turnaround its PC unit, WSJ Leadership Institute's Isabelle Bousquette reports.

Dell’s PC slowdown last year triggered a leadership-led reset rather than a quiet product tweak, with Chief Operating Officer and Vice Chairman Jeff Clarke temporarily taking control and publicly acknowledging that Dell drifted too far toward premium PCs at the expense of broader demand.

Dell’s PCs in 2025 underperformed both in the enterprise and consumer space compared with competitors.

“I owe you an apology. We didn’t listen to you. You were right on branding,” Clarke said during a CES preview in December. He added, “We can course correct, we can be humble, and we can correct decisions that we’ve made in the past.”

At CES in Las Vegas this week Dell announced plans to play in some of those lower tiers with new product releases set to hit the market in 2026. It also plans to revive the XPS brand after backlash from loyal customers. 

Dell said Rob Bruckner, who joined the company in early December, will now lead the commercial PC business. Clarke will continue to lead the consumer side until a new leader is chosen.

The broadening comes at a challenging time for all PC makers as they contend with skyrocketing prices for memory chips. The PC market is forecast to contract by 2.4% in 2026 after growing 6.6% in 2025, according to research from International Data Corp.

Also looking for a CES comeback... 

With the U.S. government now a backer of Intel, CEO Lip-Bu Tan is on the hook to show progress in the chip maker's turnaround plans. At CES on Monday, Intel offered a peak, unveiling laptops powered by its new Panther Lake processors, Bloomberg reports. The company also said it plans to launch a platform for handheld videogame devices. 

AMD unveiled its latest AI chips, including its advanced MI455 AI processors as well as the Instinct MI440X, for on-premise use. Together the chips are expected to be AMD's most legitimate competition to Nvidia yet, the WSJ reports.

The week at CES finds tech, industrial and automotive companies  accelerating their bets on automation and physical AI.

Germany’s Robert Bosch said it will invest more than $2.9 billion in artificial intelligence by 2027, betting on AI to boost productivity and drive new products, WSJ reports. At CES, the company unveiled AI-based driver-assist systems, sensors and robotics tools, and announced deeper collaborations with Microsoft on agentic AI for factories and Kodiak AI on self-driving trucks.

Hyundai Motor Group plans to deploy humanoid robots from its Boston Dynamics unit at its Georgia manufacturing plant starting in 2028, Reuters reports. The Atlas robots will begin with parts sequencing and gradually expand to assembly and heavier, higher-risk tasks by 2030.

Separately, Boston Dynamics and Google DeepMind announced a partnership to integrate DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics AI into Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid robot, Wired reports.

Nvidia said Monday that it aims to power Level 4 robotaxi fleets as soon as 2027 using its AI chips and Drive AV software, starting with limited deployments alongside partners including Uber, CNBC reports. 

President Trump had a vague but tantalizing message for a couple of American oil executives roughly a month before the U.S. captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro: “Get ready.” (WSJ)

The U.S. is dropping universal recommendations for certain childhood vaccines, the Trump administration said Monday, in a dramatic overhaul of the immunization schedule that recommends fewer shots and marks a major policy shift under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (WSJ)

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting said it is dissolving the 58-year-old nonprofit umbrella organization that oversaw government funding for the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. The decision was expected after federal funding for public media was eliminated last year. (WSJ)

ICE plans to send more than 2,000 personnel to Minneapolis and the surrounding areas to carry out immigration arrests, according to people familiar with the plans, including a government official. (WSJ)

This February 10-11, technology leaders will gather in Palo Alto for The WSJ Technology Council Summit to explore the realities of enterprise AI, the evolving role of tech leadership and the urgency behind building meaningful, business-driving AI strategies. Join the Technology Council and be part of the conversations shaping the future of corporate innovation.

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The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.