From AI to immersive gaming: What CES 2025 revealed about our connectivity needs

By Ivo Ivanov (pictured), CEO of DE-CIX

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is one of the biggest events in the tech calendar, attracting tech journalists and afficionados from around the world as businesses showcase their latest inventions and innovations. At CES 2025, we saw the unveiling of the world’s largest LED TV at 163 inches; Nvidia launched its new GeForce RTX 5000 series graphics card; a new set of immersive AR smart glasses made headlines, and in the field of smart home technology we even saw an autonomous robot vacuum take to the stage with a mechanical arm designed for picking up socks.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the biggest subjects echoing around the halls of this year’s CES was Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the numerous AI-driven technologies and data-intensive applications that are changing how we live and work. From breakthroughs in autonomous vehicles to immersive virtual and augmented reality experiences, the event underscored the rapid pace at which digital advancements are transforming our world.

One defining moment of the conference was NVIDIA’s keynote, where founder Jensen Huang highlighted the evolution of AI, stating, “It started with perception AI — understanding images, words, and sounds. Then generative AI — creating text, images, and sound. Now, we’re entering the era of ‘physical AI,’ AI that can proceed, reason, plan, and act.” This next wave of AI promises to revolutionize entire industries by bridging the gap between digital intelligence and physical applications.

The technologies on display made one thing abundantly clear: the world is moving toward an era where real-time data processing and ultra-low latency connectivity are non-negotiable. From smart city infrastructure to advanced robotics, to augmented reality headsets and wearable healthcare applications, many features of these new technologies will rely wholly on seamless, high-performance connectivity. In that sense, CES 2025 was not just a window into what’s next – it was a call to action to ensure that we have the collective infrastructure in place to support it.

AI needs a longer runway

AI isn’t a single innovation, or even a single technology. Like the Internet, it’s a concept that is forever growing, evolving, and being adapted to meet our ambitions and realize our goals. CES 2025 provided a brief glimpse into this transformation, and demonstrated that AI has moved beyond mere automation and processing, toward something entirely different. NVIDIA’s concept of “physical AI,” introduced during the keynote, is emblematic of this shift. By enabling AI to reason, plan, and act in the physical world – or at least augment how we interact in it – the potential in fields such as robotics, logistics, and urban infrastructure is practically limitless.

But there are challenges. While AI is barreling forward at breakneck speed, we need to ensure that it has ample runway to take off and realize its potential. Many of the technologies on display at CES depend on enormous volumes of data being collected, analyzed, and acted upon in milliseconds. The Meta Quest headset might want to put you courtside in an NBA game, or the Halliday smart glasses unveiled at CES might want to add an AR overlay as you go about your working day, but none of these systems can work effectively without a strong pillar of connectivity. In fact, the tech industry is littered with new innovations that were abandoned or phased out because we simply didn’t have the high-performance, low-latency connectivity infrastructure in place to properly support them. They were ahead of their time.

So, how do we ensure that this next generation of AI-infused tech avoids the same fate? It’s simple: we build a bigger runway. In other words, we give the technology the connectivity infrastructure it needs to flourish in the hands of users.

The power of interconnection

Basic connectivity is sufficient for checking emails, joining Zoom calls, and streaming films on Netflix, but CES 2025 laid out a future where connectivity isn’t just a foundation, but a central pillar of our technology landscape. Our products are evolving rapidly, but it’s time we apply the same level of ingenuity and innovation to our connectivity infrastructure. Take Internet Exchanges (IXs), for instance. IXs live in data centers and serve as hubs where networks interconnect directly in order to optimize data flow. By reducing the number of intermediary connections or network “hops” and bypassing traditional IP transit (the public Internet), IXs enable faster, more reliable, and more cost-efficient data exchange for businesses and ISPs, ensuring that latency-sensitive applications like AI, immersive gaming, and smart city infrastructure can operate smoothly.

Neutral IXs, in particular, offer a unique advantage. Unlike traditional models that are tied to specific data centers or providers, neutral IXs are operated independently, welcoming connections from multiple networks and providers. This neutrality leads to much greater reach, enabling networks housed in various independently operated data center facilities to interconnect and exchange data traffic at low latency. This creates greater network density and therefore more routes for data to travel, helping to overcome bottlenecks and increase the speed, stability and resiliency of data flows. By connecting locally to IXs in every region where companies and ISPs are serving customers, they can ensure higher-performance connectivity to enable these exciting use cases. The best part is, this is already beginning to happen. DE-CIX research from 2024 reveals that the number of IXs in the US has grown dramatically, with a 600% increase in IX deployments since 2010, and more than 80% are now data center and carrier neutral. As the network density at these IXs continues to grow, this will bring us one step closer to the next-generation Internet.

So, as we consider a future with autonomous vehicles, immersive reality headsets, and robotic vacuum cleaners that can pick up our socks, we need to remember that the sky isn’t necessarily the limit – connectivity is. The Internet has and will remain “the great facilitator” of our technological ambition – we simply need to make sure we put the infrastructure in place to support it.