AMD, Intel and Nvidia rumored to be giving Computex 2020 a miss – the first hints that the show is in trouble?

Computex 2020
(Image credit: TechRadar)

Computex may be without some major players this year, including AMD and Intel, as well as Nvidia.

As you may recall, Computex should have happened in June, but following the outbreak of coronavirus, the Taipei show was postponed until September.

However, the rescheduled event (now due to take place from September 28 to 30) may find some major tech firms aren’t in attendance, according to a report by DigiTimes, and that includes AMD, Intel and Nvidia as mentioned.

The report insists that these companies are “unlikely to participate at Computex this year due to the coronavirus pandemic”, although we should note that this isn’t a concrete statement, naturally.

Even the rumor mill is saying it’s ‘unlikely’ that they’ll be present, rather than stating that they definitely won’t – and we must remember that this is just speculation anyway.

Others to follow?

Still, this casts a rather gloomy shadow over Computex 2020, particularly as the report also notes that the possible absence of these chip giants has meant that the big motherboard and GPU makers are also considering pulling out.

DigiTimes reckons that MSI and Gigabyte will be no-shows, as it were, although Asus is apparently still planning to be at Computex. Again, treat all this with a fair degree of caution, but the overall feeling around the event and how it might pan out just got a good deal shakier, for sure.

When Computex 2020 was originally put back, at the time, we observed that September could be a rather optimistic time frame given the seriousness of Covid-19 across the globe, so it wouldn’t exactly be a surprise if there are some high-profile absences.

This also raises the prospect of the whole shebang potentially being canceled entirely, as has happened with other big tech events so far this year, like MWC, for example, and many others such as Apple’s WWDC 2020 which has been turned into an online event, or Nvidia’s GTC keynote which is now being shown on YouTube later this week (on May 14).

The report also observes that some motherboard and GPU makers are planning online product launches in a similar vein to what we’ve already seen, as an alternative to showing off their goodies at Computex.

Via Notebookcheck.net

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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