Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus

January 19, 2026·1 hr 5 min·5 clips

Razer's CEO defends using Grok for its AI companion, despite the model's ongoing deepfake porn controversy.

Razer comes to CES with its usual black-and-green hardware identity, plus one announcement that is much harder to shrug off. Nilay Patel starts with the mice, keyboards, gaming PCs, and RGB, then turns to Project Ava: an AI companion with a physical presence, described as an anime hologram in a jar and powered by Grok. The weirdness is the point, but the host treats it like a product question, not just a spectacle. Razer is taking $20 reservations and says it expects to ship, potentially even this year, which makes "it's only a prototype" a weaker answer. The live setting gives the interview a little more crackle. This is Decoder at Brooklyn Bowl in Vegas, so the questions have stage energy without losing the usual pressure. From there, the excerpt moves into how Razer runs. The company has about 2,000 people, with operations, supply chain, legal, and other standard functions inside a relatively flat management team. The operating rule, as described, is simple enough: when there is no direct mandate, teams should ask what the customer, specifically the gamer, would want. Nilay pushes on that. Razer is dual headquartered in Irvine and Singapore, has close to 20 offices, and splits its business roughly across the US, Europe, and Asia. That makes "the gamer" less tidy as a product filter. Different regions want different things. The answer starts with local input, with design team members in various regions feeding those needs back into product choices. The tension is the useful part: Razer talks about a global gamer audience, but its own process depends on regional listening, fewer layers, and a CEO who keeps pulling the company back toward the customer.

As heard by us

A sharp CES-stage interview about Razer's Project Ava, Grok-powered AI, and the gamer-first logic behind the pitch.

Decoder catches Razer CEO Min Liang Tan at CES with the company in a familiar place: selling gaming hardware flair while pushing a much weirder bet on AI.

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