Update (03/16/2020): What a difference a week makes. Citing the latest developments in the now coronavirus pandemic, NVIDIA has altered its GTC plans once again. The company is now postponing its GTC announcements entirely. A new date will be scheduled "once the situation stabilizes."

Given the much lower-key nature of NVIDIA's previously planned news releases, I was not expecting the company to bring out its biggest announcements to begin with. But now the matter is settled entirely, as there will not be any NVIDIA announcements at all.

Meanwhile, Digital GTC will still be occurring as scheduled, with NVIDIA offering online workshop content as well as streaming presentations supplied by participating speakers.


NVIDIA Axes GTC Digital Keynote In Favor Of News Releases; Fate Of Major Announcements Unknown

Original Article (03/09/2020): Last week, in light of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, NVIDIA opted to scale down their plans for their annual trade show, the 2020 GPU Technology Conference. At the time the company announced that they would take the show entirely digital, including offering webinars, pre-recorded talks, and of course, CEO Jensen Huang’s annual keynote. However a week later, and those digital offerings are now getting a whole lot slimmer, as NVIDIA is announcing that they have canceled the keynote altogether.

Citing the current coronavirus situation and the potential for it to impact their ability to produce a keynote presentation, the company is “deferring plans to deliver a webcast keynote”. But rather than give up on making any announcements altogether, in place of that NVIDIA now intends to issue a series of news announcements on March 24th that had previously been scheduled to be shared in the keynote. So while NVIDIA has scaled things back even further, there will still be some news coming out of the company later this month.

The big, outstanding question of course is how many “major” announcements NVIDIA will still go ahead with. GTC keynotes in recent years have been an onion of sorts, with core NVIDIA technology announcements surrounded by news about partnerships, projects customers have been working on, NVIDIA’s own research projects, etc. So there is a great deal of (intentional?) ambiguity in today’s announcement from NVIDIA, as it’s not clear if NVIDIA is still going to make some long-expected core technology announcements, or if they’ll withhold them for another time.

Complicating all of this one degree further is that the company’s annual investor day takes place during GTC. That presentation, which typically encapsulates the keynote’s major announcements with a great deal of discussion on NVIDIA’s financials, has been scaled back as well, but not entirely. NVIDIA will still be doing an investor call on the morning of the 24th, which is set to follow the release of their news announcements. As a result, there are several competing factors here in determining what news NVIDIA still needs to or will want to present.

The good news, at least, is that the rest of GTC Digital will still be taking place. That kicks off on March 25th, with NVIDIA set to release more details on how the company will be collecting and sharing that material.

At any rate, AnandTech will be covering all of the news from GTC, regardless of what form it comes in. So be sure to check back in on the 24th to see what NVIDIA is (or isn’t?) announcing this month.

Source: NVIDIA

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  • sing_electric - Tuesday, March 10, 2020 - link

    To be 100% fair, the CDC pandemic response team was just one part of many very large (and interconnected) machines. The US has frequently been a kind of slumbering giant with these kinds of issues - slow to get started but powerful once moving, partly because the US response is so distributed: There's the CDC, various other federal agencies, then there's state and local health agencies (which tend to have more independent power than their equivalents in other countries), not to mention major health systems.

    This administration has definitely bungled the response at the federal level (and the FDA's delay in rolling out testing is a huge misstep), but there are a lot of other very competent players in the country. (As one example: Thinking what's now nCoV-19 could be a major issue, researchers at the University of Washington started developing tests months ago.)
  • watzupken - Monday, March 16, 2020 - link

    I agree that we should expect some delays in new product releases this year. Most fabs are likely not running at full capacity at this point, same goes to factories that assembles the products.
  • edzieba - Tuesday, March 10, 2020 - link

    Jensen: "Well if I don't get to leather up in front of everyone, then what's the point of it all?!"
  • Dragonstongue - Tuesday, March 10, 2020 - link

    HA ha ha ha
  • AshlayW - Tuesday, March 17, 2020 - link

    Lots of snowflakes in the comments here.
  • catavalon21 - Tuesday, March 17, 2020 - link

    Would not have guessed so at the time of the cancellation, but the event was slated for San Jose, which is in Santa Clara County, one of several Bay Area counties under mandatory Shelter-At-Home orders. What a difference a few weeks makes. Ugh.

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