Update: NVIDIA GTC 2020 Announcements Postponed Entirely

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 24^th 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 24^th, 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 25^th, 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 24^th to see what NVIDIA is (or isn’t?) announcing this month.