Anticipation is building for what is bound to be the biggest and most important Computex in many years, with the heads of the world’s top four semiconductor companies, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm all converging on the event to promote their visions of the new AI era and, in the case of Jenson Huang, enjoy some traditional Taiwanese food in the island’s restaurants and night markets.
Taiwan’s leading technology industry players including Acer, Adata, ASRock, Asus, Benq, Cooler Master, Gigabyte, MSI, and Thermaltake will also have a major presence at the event, showcasing their latest AI servers, AI PCs, gaming systems, chassis, motherboards, graphics cards, displays, power supplies, cooling systems, and other accessories and peripherals. There will be no doubt plenty of cool stuff to see in the booths of over 1,500 exhibitors.
AI will of course be the primary focus of Computex 2024 as the industry looks to the technology to drive a new wave of hypergrowth. In the semiconductor space, competition will be particularly fierce in the AI PC space, with both Intel and AMD eager to gain lost ground following the recent launch of Microsoft CoPilot+ laptops based exclusively on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor (at least for now). Intel and AMD are expected to launch their new Lunar Lake and Zen 5 processor platforms at the event to counter the threat. Meanwhile, the market leader Nvidia is rumored to be introducing next-generations graphics chips for consumers and may even reveal plans for its own AI processor Microsoft CoPilot+ laptops.
While Taiwan’s leading computer manufacturers will no doubt be displaying a slew of AI PC desktops and laptops featuring chips from Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and Qualcomm, companies like Asus, Gigabyte, Quanta, and Foxconn will putting a much stronger focus on their AI servers based largely on Nvidia H100 and Blackwell platforms because, as we reported yesterday, the margins and revenues from these products are so much higher than for traditional PCs. Advanced air-cooling and liquid-cooling solutions that prevent these powerful AI servers from overheating are also expected to be a major focus at the show. In a world where chips are running at ever high temperatures, thermal management is king!
Indeed, Computex 2024 marks a major coming-out party for the Taiwan tech industry as it ascends the industry value chain from its OEM PC manufacturing roots to designing and building the most sophisticated and powerful AI servers in the world. Let the fireworks begin!
