Razer's CEO says AI brings 'a new renaissance' to gaming
Fortune Angelica Ang
Razer’s CEO says AI will remake gaming, and the company is already selling the gear and avatars for it. He thinks it could push a $188.8 billion industry toward a trillion-dollar one.
Based on reporting by Fortune, Angelica Ang — read the original for the full story.
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Razer wants to be more than the brand of glowing mice and keyboards. Min-Liang Tan, the company’s co-founder and CEO, says AI is the next step for gaming itself, not just another feature. His pitch is big: AI will bring “a new renaissance” to games and could turn an industry that made about $188.8 billion last year into a trillion-dollar one.
That ambition is showing up in products, not just speeches. Razer’s new Barracuda AI headset, unveiled on Sept. 28, includes built-in cameras for computer vision, smart audio processing and support for models including ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Tan says the company is taking a privacy-first route with wearables and is not following the same path as Meta.
Then there are Sumi and Niko, the company’s AI avatars, each with a scripted personality and backstory. Razer says the characters have “personality and emotion engines,” and its desktop AI companion, Razer AVA, is expected to ship in the second half of 2026. It’s a strange little glimpse of where the company thinks gaming is headed: not just hardware, but digital companions with attitudes.
Tan’s broader case is that AI will change how games are made and how they are played. He points to tools like Google and Unity’s Playground, which lets users create games from prompts, and to Razer’s own QA Co-AI, a testing tool meant to catch performance issues and review bug drafts. But the flood of AI-made games is already a mess. Steam disclosures of generative AI jumped sharply last year, and some studies suggest most of the growth in monthly releases comes from AI-made titles that barely make money.
Razer is trying to be the company that sorts through the slop. Tan says that when the glut gets bad, Razer can help make content better. That’s a neat sales pitch, and also a revealing one: the future of AI in gaming may be less about magic and more about cleanup.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Razer is reading the room correctly: if AI is going to flood games with junk, somebody will happily sell the shovels, the cleanup crew, and the headset. The real joke is that “new renaissance” sounds romantic, but most of the near-term value in AI gaming will probably come from quality control and tooling. That is not glamorous, which is exactly why it sounds believable.
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