Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus | Decoder – YouTube
Razer has gone big on AI. It opened up three global AI hubs in the latter half of 2025, and at the start of 2026, showed off Project Motoko (AI glasses but as a gaming headset) and Project Ava (a holographic AI assistant).
“We very rarely sit down with the finance people and say, ‘Oh, do we do projections and things like that?’ It’s really more of a ‘by the seat of our pants’ kind of thing. It’s cool, we like it, it’s gonna be fun, we want it for ourselves. I think the real kind of trigger there is, do we want it for ourselves? And if we really want it for ourselves, and we think it’s cool, we’ll bring it to market.”
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Naturally, this leads Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge, to ask about what he calls the ‘holographic anime waifu’. Tan compares it to the likes of Cortana from Halo and suggests it’s always been a dream of gamers. “It’s a little bit of sci-fi, us growing up always wanting something cool like that, and so we said, ‘Hey, it’s a great concept,’ and I think the community loves it.”
But will they fall in love with it? We know people are already forming relationships with chatbots (hell, people have married bridges and cars), but by actively creating this sort of “anime waifu” for your desktop, is there a risk of it enabling unhealthy relationships between users and Project Ava?
“Well, I would say that potentially that could happen,” says Tan, “but that’s definitely not something we plan to build the product toward.”
Tan clarifies that Razer is actively taking reservations and does have plans to put it out at some point. Ava itself was actually announced last year, but the initial product was just an app on a computer that backseat gamed. Now, it’s much more involved and powered by Grok, xAI’s AI assistant.
Given the noise around the Grok deepfake AI imagery scandal, it’s natural that the trust and safety aspects of xAI as a Razer partner gets touched on, though Tan almost entirely avoids the question.
“Specifically, I don’t really like to comment on that at this point in time,” he says, “because I don’t have enough information, I think, right now. I really don’t. My focus to date has been more in terms of what’s the best conversational model that we’ve got, and they’re great, they’re fantastic.”
(Image credit: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
In character for a company looking to get an AI waifu on your desk, Tan believes that AI will be near inescapable going forward. “I believe that at some point, it’s not just games, but AI is just gonna be so prevalent or ubiquitous that every single vertical, healthcare, gaming, and entertainment, is gonna have some elements of AI there. And we are just going along with it.”
Despite its own efforts in the AI world, Tan seemingly doesn’t just want Razer to be enabling users to churn out rubbish—for example, it’s creating AI-powered QA tools for developers. “I think for us, we’re all aligned against gen AI slop that is just churned out from a couple of prompts and stuff like that.”
Tan argues that new forms of artists will pop up in the AI age, who will weave prompts into their workflow to make different types of art. He also claims that people will get sick of AI work and will look for something more.
“At some point in time, we’re going to see so much slop out there that we’re going to crave for really great art, really great design,” says Tan. “And that’s what’s gonna happen. We’ve seen a cycle go over and over and over again.”
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