Razer's Min-Liang Tan bets AI will turn gaming into a trillion-dollar industry

Razer co-founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan says artificial intelligence is about to reshape the gaming industry so thoroughly that he expects it to grow from its current size of hundreds of billions of dollars into a trillion-dollar market, with Razer positioning itself to be one of the companies building the hardware that gets it there.

Tan, who trained as a lawyer before founding Razer with Robert Krakoff in 2005, has framed the shift as a new renaissance for gaming rather than a narrow product category, betting that AI capability woven into gaming hardware and software will expand who plays and how they play far beyond today's roughly 3.5 billion gamers worldwide, a group that generated an estimated $188.8 billion in industry revenue last year.

Razer has already begun rolling out products built around that bet. The company unveiled Barracuda AI in late September, a wearable headset built with computer vision and smart audio features that connects to AI assistants including ChatGPT and Gemini. It is also developing Razer AVA, an AI desktop companion featuring virtual personalities built on xAI's Grok model, expected to launch in the second half of 2026, alongside a separate AI tool called Razer QA Co-AI aimed at automating aspects of game testing and quality assurance.

The push comes several years after Razer went private in 2022, delisting from the Hong Kong stock exchange where it had traded under the ticker 1337. The company now employs more than 1,500 people across hubs in Irvine, California and Singapore, with the United States accounting for roughly half of its revenue, Europe about 30 percent, and Singapore itself under 1 percent.

Tan's ambition extends beyond gaming peripherals into AI hardware more broadly, a goal that would put Razer in competition with a far wider set of companies than the gaming accessory makers it has traditionally rivaled, betting that the company's existing brand and installed base of gamers gives it a running start as AI features become standard across the devices players use.