The big picture: If only this photo could speak a thousand words. They don’t get much bigger than Nvidia, TSMC and Quanta Computer. So when the top executives from these companies get together for dinner and stroll through a Taiwanese local night market, the industry can’t help but wonder what they discussed. Some possibilities: Nvidia may be establishing a second R&D center in Taiwan or Nvidia is working with MediaTek and Intel to build Arm-based CPUs for mobile computing. Of course, it could have been just a pleasant evening for harried executives.
For chip enthusiasts it is a photo for the ages: Barry Lam, founder and the chairman of Quanta Computer, Jensen Huang, co-founder, president and CEO of Nvidia and Morris Chang, the founder and former CEO of TSMC, are sitting alongside each other after an outing at the Ningxia night market in Taipei, Taiwan.
They are there for the start of Computex 2024 and while the photo depicts a casual group enjoying a pleasant evening, they were being mobbed by fans and media.
There is also a fourth person in the photos: Kris Yao, one of Taiwan’s leading architects who has designed three TSMC facilities and the Quanta R&D Center. It was the tech luminaries, though, on which the attention focused. Why these four? What did they talk about besides shop? Is this anything more than a casual dinner?
Of course, it could just have been a group of businesspeople soaking up the atmosphere of a very significant country for their endeavors. Earlier this week, Huang called Taiwan “one of the most important countries in the world. It is the center of the electronics industry and the computer industry.”
Huang, who apparently likes night markets, has also during this trip visited the Linjiang Street Night Market where he ate mango ice and also went to the fruit stall to buy fruits, according to admiring media reports.
Here’s another possibility: Nvidia may be planning to invest more in Taiwan and the conversation among the trio could have touched on that. In April, the China Times reported that the Technology Department of the Ministry of Economic Affairs said that Nvidia’s current research and development is “going smoothly” and it will “assist our manufacturers in AI application development”.
The rumor is that Nvidia is considering a second R&D center in Taiwan, two years after opening its first Asian AI R&D center in the country. TSMC’s input would be critical to this project.
Another possibility: Tom’s Hardware posits that this photo lends credibility to reports that Nvidia is working with MediaTek and Intel to build Arm-based CPUs for mobile computing. It would be a good move to have Quanta in the mix if that were to materialize.
Or maybe they were discussing the big announcement that Huang plans to make at Computex tomorrow at 7 pm at the NTU Sports Center. When asked by reporters what it would be, he merely said “You are going to have to see the speech.”