Computex: Two of the Big Three International Computer Shows Are Gone — the Last One Grew in Taipei

30-second overview: Computex Taipei turns 45 this year. It grew from a 1981 export exhibition for small and medium businesses beside Songshan Airport into the stage that the world's AI giants must attend every late May and early June. Its two contemporaries — Germany's Hannover-based CeBIT and America's Las Vegas COMDEX — have both folded. The 2026 theme is "AI Together." Jensen Huang stepped onto the Taipei stage and opened with "It's great to be back home." That week, three CEOs — NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Intel — took the stage in relay, and Taichung's HIWIN made its cross-industry debut, connecting harmonic reducers to the joints of humanoid robots. Forty-five years — from selling capacitors to selling joints — and this island has been doing the same one thing all along: taking the "manufacturing" that developed countries outsourced away, and doing it so well the world cannot route around it.

It's Great to Be Back Home

On the morning of June 1, 2026, in Taipei. Jensen Huang stepped onto the GTC Taipei stage and opened with "It is great to be back home."¹²

The massive presentation backdrop behind him listed the shop names of Taiwanese street snacks — Wang Ji Fu-Cheng rice dumplings, Fu Ba Wang pork knuckles — with not a single chip model number in sight¹. A Tainan boy who moved to America at age nine and later founded the world's most valuable company in California³, returning to Taipei, called this place "home," called it "the origin of it all"¹.

In that keynote he unveiled a next-generation compute chip codenamed Vera Rubin and declared it "in full production," and he showed off a chip called N1X, describing it as "the world's most amazing chip"; he talked about "useful AI has arrived," and about "agentic AI has arrived"¹⁴. He said one line that would be quoted over and over: "AI agents will be the largest users of computing."² But what the room remembered most firmly may still be that backdrop with the rice dumplings and pork knuckles on it.

The exhibition he was standing at is called COMPUTEX — Taipei International Computer Show — 45 years old this year. And he wasn't the only one flooding into Taipei that week. Earlier that same morning, Qualcomm's Cristiano Amon delivered the opening keynote at Nangang Exhibition Hall 2, framing this year as the "Year of Agents" and announcing Dragonfly, the new data center brand⁵. A few hours later, Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武), just three months into his tenure as Intel CEO, took the Computex stage for the first time as head of Intel, opening with "x86 has powered data centers for more than five decades"⁶. Three companies, three keynotes, a combined market cap exceeding ten trillion USD⁷.

AMD's Lisa Su did not give a keynote this year — her second consecutive year of skipping this slot. But she spent five days in Taiwan in late May, announcing an additional ten-billion-USD investment plan for Taiwan⁸.

📝 Curator's note
A question worth pausing on: why do a handful of the world's most valuable tech companies choose Taipei — a computer show that began in 1981 beside Songshan Airport — to announce their most critical products? The going explanation is "the Jensen Huang whirlwind," a Taiwanese-American celebrity CEO who brings the world's attention to Taiwan. But that explanation gets cause and effect backwards. What Jensen Huang came back to is a place that could not be routed around in the first place. To see this clearly, you have to start with that small, unpromising exhibition from 45 years ago.

The Export Exhibition Beside Songshan Airport

In 1981, Taiwan's personal computer industry was only just budding. The first edition of the exhibition that year had a very plain name — the "Taipei Computer Show" — held at the TAITRA exhibition hall beside Songshan Airport, organized by the Taipei Computer Association⁹¹⁰.

Its function at the start was very practical: give Taiwan's newly emerging small computer businesses a booth to lay out their motherboards and components, and sell to foreign buyers who came to Taiwan to source¹⁰. It was the "money-flooded-Taiwan" era, and the electronics-parts culture of Guanghua Market was about to spill over into an export business — and this exhibition was that business's annual gathering point.

By the second edition, there were only 40 exhibitors⁹. No one imagined that, more than four decades later, that number would become 1,500 companies and 6,000 booths¹¹.

The Year Stan Shih Changed the Name

Stan Shih, founder of Acer. In 1984 he officially renamed the "Taipei Computer Show" to COMPUTEX TAIPEI, hanging a world-facing sign on this exhibition; the photo is from his 2014 press interview at Taipei IT Month. Photo: Tony Tseng, 2014-12-05. License via Wikimedia Commons.

1984 was a turning point. According to Wikipedia and multiple reports, the then-chairman of the Taipei Computer Association, Stan Shih (施振榮) — the person who would later found Acer — approved renaming the exhibition's English name to "COMPUTEX TAIPEI"⁹¹⁰. A local engineer's naming decision hung a world-facing sign on an exhibition that had until then only served Taiwan's own manufacturers.

The following year, starting with the 5th edition in 1985, the semi-official Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) joined as co-organizer, and the Chinese name was updated to "Taipei International Computer Show"⁹. From then on it had two engines: one, a private industry association that understood the sector and stayed close to manufacturers' needs; the other, a trade promotion body with the resources to push the exhibition internationally. With both engines turning together, the show began to climb.

By 1989, the industry generally agreed it had become Asia's largest computer exhibition, ranked worldwide only behind Germany's Hannover CeBIT and America's COMDEX⁹. Those were the golden years of Taiwan's PC OEM boom, and future global brands like ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI all first walked out into the world through booths at this show.

💡 Did you know?
Computex's venues have "grown" outward piece by piece. Beside Songshan Airport in 1981, then settled at Taipei World Trade Center (TWTC) Hall 1 on Xinyi Road in 1986; in 2003 delayed to September because of SARS and folded TWTC Hall 3 in for the first time; four halls opened together in 2004; from 2008 onwards, Nangang Exhibition Hall 1 (total investment about USD 110 million) was folded in as well⁹¹². It's like a tree that keeps sprouting new branches — the pot has never been changed. In 2026 the show "returns to TWTC Hall 1" for the first time to set up an AI robotics zone, with both venues open in parallel¹³.

Three Big Computer Shows — Two of Them Died

Entering the 2000s, the balance among the world's three big computer shows began to tip.

The first to fall was America's COMDEX. It began in 1979 in Las Vegas and peaked in 1996: 225,000 visitors, 2,337 exhibitors¹⁴. But after the dot-com bust and 9/11, IBM, Apple, Compaq and other majors shifted to private invitation-only launch events one after another, and the demand-side purpose — reaching resellers through this show — collapsed entirely. The 2003 edition had only 500 exhibitors and 40,000 visitors, an 80% collapse from the peak¹⁴¹⁵. The following June, organizer MediaLive announced a "postponement," and the show has never been held again since¹⁶.

CeBIT 2005 in Hanover, Germany. At the height of the dot-com boom it once reached 850,000 attendees — undisputed world number one; in 2018 it announced it was going into the history books. Photo: Florian K, 2005-03-16. License via Wikimedia Commons.

CeBIT died more slowly, but ended the same way. It spun off from the Hannover Messe industrial fair to become independent in 1986, and was once the world's number one¹⁷. Thirty-two years later, on November 28, 2018, organizer Deutsche Messe announced: "due to declining visitor and exhibitioner attendance, CeBIT would be canceled for the foreseeable future"¹⁸¹⁹.

Two shows, different causes of death, but structurally the same position: both were "demand-side" shows. COMDEX sold to American buyers, media, resellers; CeBIT sold to Europe. When the manufacturing center of gravity for semiconductors and PCs shifted inch by inch to Asia, it made more sense for European buyers to fly straight to Taipei than to fly to Hannover, and American journalists writing up product launches no longer needed to cram into Las Vegas. The demand-side shows emptied out first.

Computex didn't die, because it grew on the supply side. Behind the city of Taipei sit 1,500 exhibitors, 6,000 booths, and the full chain from wafer, packaging, PCB, connectors, all the way to assembly OEM¹¹. If buyers don't come here, they don't meet the engineers, don't see next-generation cooling solutions, don't get to touch the OEMs that can turn samples around in three months. Of everything called a "world-class computer show," the one that survived happens to have grown on the manufacturing end.

One qualification: when we say "of the big three computer shows, only Taipei is left," it needs to be precise — America's CES (in Las Vegas) still opens every January, but it long ago pivoted from a computer show to a broader consumer electronics event; Barcelona's MWC took over as the main stage of the mobile communications era; the data center world still has OCP Global Summit, and the supercomputing world still has SC. The reason Computex is "the one that's left" is limited to the subcategory of "general-purpose computer shows tied to manufacturing" — not to say every other big tech show on the planet has folded.

2016 — "Your Moment of Zen"

Looking back, Computex was never a straight upward line. In 2012, global PC shipments dropped year-over-year for the first time, and smartphones scooped up the consumer end's attention in one bowl²⁰. Intel's 14nm Broadwell process slipped from a planned Q2 2014 to a Q4 2014 shipping date, and the "Tick-Tock" rhythm was rewritten into a three-year cycle from that point on²¹²². Those years, the Computex booths were shrouded in a "PC is dead" shadow.

And in the very deepest year of the PC winter — on Wednesday morning, June 1, 2016 — AMD's CEO Lisa Su walked onto the main Computex stage.

She wasn't there to put out the fire. She was there to swap the engine.

On stage she uncapped an 8-core processor, codenamed Summit Ridge, meant for desktop PCs, with an architecture called Zen. Then she said the line that PC enthusiast circles would later treat as a coming-of-age declaration: "Zen is delivering 40 percent more IPC than our previous processor." Zen's instructions per clock — 40% more than the previous generation²³. She added: "Zen is a from scratch architectural design, for those of us who do those you know it takes a lot of work." Zen is a from-scratch new architecture, and anyone who's built one knows how much work that takes²⁴²³.

The media didn't quite believe it in the moment. AMD had been thrashed by Intel through the Bulldozer generation; the last few years had left it only the low end, with brand value at rock bottom. "From scratch," "40 percent IPC" — those promises had been heard too many times in the past decade. Wccftech, PC Perspective, TweakTown — their headlines that same day read like a gamble: "Here It Is! Your Moment of Zen!"²³²⁴²⁵

Then Zen actually delivered. On March 2 the following year, the Ryzen 7 1700X shipped, and Intel's high-end desktop market started bleeding. AMD's market cap, which was under USD 3 billion when Lisa Su took over in 2014, climbed all the way to the hundred-billion tier by 2020. At the Computex booths, motherboard makers had things to sell again, cooling vendors had orders to take again, and PC DIY enthusiasts had a reason to fly to Taipei every May again.

Lisa Su was born in Tainan (in 1969) and moved with her family to Queens, New York at age three; her father was a statistician, her mother an accountant²⁶. Incidentally, Jensen Huang is her first cousin once removed — Jensen Huang's mother is Lisa Su's grandfather's younger sister²⁷. The two CEOs who rewrote the geography of the computing industry share a family origin in Tainan.

That 2016 keynote was the key foreshadowing of Computex's escape from the PC winter. But it would be seven more years — 2023 — before Jensen Huang would walk onto the Computex stage and say "We're back"²⁸ — the year he unveiled the Grace Hopper superchip, and used NVLink to string together 256 H100s into a 1-exaflop DGX GH200, bringing generative AI into every data center. Computex was thereby fished out of the PC winter and became the AI main stage.

💡 Did you know?
Computex also began hosting the InnoVEX startup exhibition in 2016. The first edition had 217 startups from 22 countries, and TAITRA EVP Walter Yeh said at the time it "completely surpassed our expectations"²⁹. It expanded the show's scope from mature PC hardware out to AI, IoT, and startups. By 2026, InnoVEX had 23 countries and nearly 500 startups — an 11-year record¹¹. Computex's next body was quietly growing at the booth next door back then.

The Mirror of Info Month: Same Island, Two Shows

This island had another computer show — one that didn't survive.

Info Month (資訊月). Launched in 1980 by the government as "Info Week," renamed "Info Month" in 1985, held every December at TWTC — selling computers to ordinary households. A PC, a printer, a boxed software bundle, timed to year-end paychecks and Lunar New Year red envelopes. That was the show that seventh, eighth, and ninth graders remember tagging along to with their dads³⁰.

In 2001, the Taipei Computer Association handed the hosting duties of Info Month over to a coalition of eight private trade associations³⁰. Then its curve started bending down. After the 2010s — with e-commerce rising, phones replacing home PCs, the consumer base fragmenting — Info Month's role shifted from "annual big worship" to just one more slot squeezed in between camera-gear fairs, auto shows, and e-commerce promotions.

Two shows, both held on the same island. One in May, one in December; one B2B, one B2C; one selling to foreign buyers who came to Taiwan, one selling to local household consumers. Computex kept growing bigger, and Info Month slowly bowed out.

The supply-side show survived; the demand-side shows are winding down. COMDEX, CeBIT, and Info Month are telling the same story in three different versions — buyers get old, buyers move, buyers get scooped up by Amazon. But wherever the manufacturing stays, the next generation of engineers goes there. Taipei has never let the chips leave.

The Six Thousand Booths Nobody Films

Nangang Exhibition Hall 1's exterior during Computex 2016. From 2008 onwards, COMPUTEX folded Nangang in as its primary venue; in 2026 the "dual venue" model had one wing at Nangang and the other returning to TWTC Hall 1. Photo: NVIDIA Taiwan, 2016-05-31. License via Wikimedia Commons.

The cameras at every Computex point at the main stage. But walk into the actual show floor, and among those six thousand booths, the vast majority of the exhibitors' names you can't even recall.

They make cooling modules, connectors, chassis, power supplies, mechanical parts, passive components, test fixtures. Their booths aren't big — sales and procurement stand and chat, no show girls, no photo wall. Their customers are Quanta, Wistron, Foxconn — and one layer up, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel. Their competitors are scattered across Xinzhuang, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan — mostly sister factories, or same-trade shops started by a foreman who went out on his own.

These booths are Computex's body. Taiwan industry estimates that nearly ninety percent of the world's AI servers are assembled and shipped by these companies³¹. But it isn't upstream money they earn. There's a self-mocking phrase in the OEM industry — "gross three to four" (毛三到四) — where gross margins oscillate between 3% and 4%, jokingly nicknamed the "Maoshan Taoists" (茅山道士, a homophone)³². By contrast, TSMC's gross margin sits around 50%, and NVIDIA's around 70%.

And the more you do, the harder it gets. AI rack unit prices are high, memory costs keep rising, and assembly fees can't be raised proportionally — so gross margins actually get squeezed. Wistron's Q4 fiscal 2025 was 5.88%; Quanta's Q3 the same year was 6.85% — and this structure was repeated over and over on the 2026 earnings calls³³.

The star lights on the main stage burn very brightly, but the booths behind the stage are still the skeleton of this show. Without them, no amount of keynotes can match the smell of engineering samples.

HIWIN Bolts Reducers Onto the Joints of Humanoid Robots

One of the booths most worth pausing at in 2026 is from Taichung.

HIWIN Technologies (2049) has been making precision motion parts for over forty years. It started with ball screws, then grew harmonic reducers, linear actuator modules, and electric grippers one after another — its original customers were machine-tool makers and semiconductor equipment makers. On June 3, 2026, the Commercial Times headline read: "Precision motion powerhouse HIWIN Technologies (2049) makes its cross-industry debut at COMPUTEX 2026"³⁴.

The phrase "cross-industry debut" is worth pausing on. A forty-plus-year-old Taichung motion parts maker, walking into a computer show for the very first time in 2026. What it brought out were three integrated product lines: a dual-arm logistics robot in partnership with an American startup; core modules for humanoid robots (the same ball screws, harmonic reducers, motors, drivers, and linear-and-rotary actuator modules); and smart grippers together with semiconductor smart equipment solutions³⁴.

It's taking everything it had built over the past forty years for machine tools, and bolting the full set onto the body of that "physical AI" that Jensen Huang describes. At the first edition of Computex in 1981, the booths beside Songshan Airport were selling capacitors, resistors, motherboards — for Hong Kong buyers to haul back and assemble computers. At the TWTC Hall 1 AI robotics zone in 2026, over 180 companies used live hardware demos on site to show "the complete industrial chain from sensors, motors, reducers, all the way to system integration"³⁵. The same 45-year curve, with the definition of "components" swapping from capacitors to reducers.

TAITRA chairman James Huang (黃志芳) said he hopes Taiwan will "leap from being a global tech manufacturing powerhouse to being a 'global AI solutions center'"³⁵. In 2026, Foxconn, Pegatron, and other OEMs that originally assembled AI servers were also showing robots on the floor³⁶.

Saying Farewell to Taipei: the Players Left Behind

But at this year's Computex, some people felt left behind.

Tom's Hardware, in its 2026-06-05 Day 4 report, wrote the headline straight: "Computex 2026, Day 4 — the B2B shift, and we say farewell to Taipei"³⁷. The piece summed up the week's observation in one line: "Computex 2026 had far more B2B-focused companies in attendance, whereas in the past, the show typically featured strictly consumer products and companies that feed into that ecosystem."³⁷

On opening day, Tom's Hardware's own Jeffrey Kampman had already inoculated readers in advance: "In a world where nobody is launching truly new graphics cards, my Computex week will almost certainly be defined by data center products, integrated graphics processors, and AI accelerators of various shapes and sizes."³⁸

PC Gamer's observation went in a different direction: "Computex 2026 has really highlighted the fact that PC gaming tech isn't all about gaming anymore."³⁹

The evidence isn't just floor vibes. In Q1 2026, consumer DRAM rose 110% and consumer SSDs rose 147%; a 32GB DDR5 memory kit that was just over USD 100 a year ago was pushed to more than USD 350⁴⁰. AMD's RDNA 5 gaming GPUs were quietly told by their AIB partners to expect a slip to late 2027 or even early 2028; NVIDIA's next-gen consumer GPUs are lined up in the same window⁴¹. On the show floor, the cooling booths were all doing liquid-cooling plates instead of RGB fans — and those players who used to come to buy high-end gaming rig parts DIY-style could sense there wouldn't be any real new GPU worth buying this year or next.

The main stage gave us physical AI, Vera Rubin, Year of Agents. The booths gave us liquid-cooling plates, reducers, humanoid robot modules. Those players who a few years ago were on the main floor hunting for new GPUs and new RGB chassis got pushed to the last two rows at the outermost edge of the show — or simply didn't come. Computex was fished out of the PC winter by AI, and survived. But this time, surviving doesn't necessarily mean every original customer segment is still inside.

What Really Holds Up the AI Main Stage Isn't Data Centers — It's the Fabs Carving the Chips

The hotter the main stage, the heavier the energy bill.

TSMC's Hsinchu Science Park fab. What actually eats electricity on the chain that holds up Computex's main stage is the upstream fab, not the downstream data center. Photo: Arusanov, 2009, Public Domain. License via Wikimedia Commons.

The Reporter's 2026-04-20 energy investigation delivered a set of counterintuitive comparisons: data center electricity in 2025 "compared with Taiwan's national 2025 electricity consumption of 282.8 billion kWh, still accounted for only about 0.5%"; while in the same year, "semiconductor manufacturing" consumed 42.38 billion kWh — nearly 15% of the national total⁴².

In other words, the chain that holds up the GB300s, Vera Rubins, and Dragonflys on the Computex main stage — what really eats the electricity isn't at the tail end. It's TSMC's upstream fabs carving out the chips. S&P Global estimates that in 2024, TSMC used about 8% of Taiwan's national electricity and 16% of the industrial sector's; by 2030, with wafer capacity 90% higher than in 2023, it could climb toward 24%⁴³.

The AI end is climbing just as steeply. In its 2023 "National Power Supply Situation Report," the Bureau of Energy of the Ministry of Economic Affairs estimated that Taiwan's AI tech electricity demand "will increase from 240,000 kW in 2023 to 2,240,000 kW in 2028, a full 2,000,000 kW increase — an 8-fold rise"⁴⁴.

The signals that the power grid can't hold up have been flashing for a while. In early August 2024, Taipower dropped a bombshell: no more new applications from data centers of 5MW or larger north of Taoyuan⁴²⁴⁵. Behind that was a 20-billion-kWh supply-demand gap — northern Taiwan consuming 93 billion kWh a year against just 75 billion kWh of local generation⁴⁵. Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs Tseng Wen-sheng added: this policy "only targets data center facilities" — R&D centers and supercomputers are not affected⁴⁵. Taipei's computer show lasts four bustling days every year, but the annual electricity ledger of the island holding it up gets harder to close year by year.

The Same Irreplaceability — Swapped from Shield to Target

For the past decade, the concept most often quoted about Taiwan has been the "silicon shield." Meaning: because 92% of the world's most advanced chips are produced in Taiwan, any armed conflict would blow up the entire global tech industry — so this island, in theory, wouldn't be attacked.

Since 2025 that concept has started flipping.

A joint analysis published on August 21, 2025 by CSET (Center for Security and Emerging Technology) and Lawfare wrote: "The more both sides treat advanced AI as a decisive strategic imperative, the greater the risk that Taiwan's once-vaunted 'silicon shield' could become a target."⁴⁶⁴⁷

The piece went on to reason about Beijing's motivations: "Beijing may view going on the offensive as its best shot at accomplishing two strategic objectives at once: achieving 'reunification' and leveling the AI playing field."⁴⁶

Newsweek's January 22 book excerpt from Kerry Brown the same year also said: "In the current scenario, TSMC's position makes China covet Taiwan even more." "For all the talk by Taiwanese officials of the 'silicon shield' protecting them, reliance on it as an absolute guarantee of the island's safety and security would be foolhardy."⁴⁸

The same slab of irreplaceability — its symbol swapped within a year.

The Taiwanese response has been "China Plus N." Wiwynn already has 70% of its capacity in Mexico; Compal's factory footprint has stretched from China all the way to Vietnam, India, Brazil, Poland, Mexico, and — added in 2024 — the United States³³⁴⁹. In August 2024, Foxconn added USD 241 million to expand AI server production in Chihuahua, Mexico; that October, Foxconn senior VP Benjamin Ting announced at Foxconn Tech Day that they were "building the largest GB200 production facility on the planet" in Guadalajara, Mexico — with a monthly capacity of 20,000 units and an annual output of 240,000 Blackwell-class servers⁵⁰⁵¹. Quanta likewise expanded AI server and EV parts production in Monterrey, Mexico⁵².

The supply chain research firm Z2Data titled its March 2025 report: "Why 'China Plus One' Has Become 'Anywhere but China,'" explaining: "What began as the cautious 'China Plus One' strategy — where companies maintained China operations while establishing backup manufacturing elsewhere — has evolved into something far more decisive: 'Anywhere but China.'"⁵³

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas's 2025 trade report added one more line: Mexico's automatic data processing machine exports have more than doubled in the past year, breaking through USD 85 billion in 2025; announced Taiwanese FDI to Texas in 2025 is estimated at USD 5.3 billion⁵⁴.

Silicon shield and distributed footprint — this island is holding both ends at once. On one side, making itself harder to attack; on the other, making sure that if something does happen, the world can still be supplied. The prettier the CEOs' words on the Computex stage, the heavier this double burden weighs on the shoulders of the engineers at the booths.

Taipei Is the Origin of It All

Behind that backdrop of rice dumplings and pork knuckles on June 1, 2026, Jensen Huang said one more line: "Taiwan possesses the world's best supply chain ecosystem."²

When he said that, in the seats below him weren't only the media — there were also engineers, salespeople, and chairpersons from HIWIN, Quanta, Wistron, Foxconn, Auras, Sunonwealth, Acer, Pegatron, Delta Electronics. One layer further behind: the master craftsmen making PCBs in Xinzhuang metal-sheet workshops, the women workers soldering connectors on Taoyuan production lines, the next-generation successors of the 700-plus machine tool and precision motion parts factories within a half-hour drive of Taichung, the 30-year-old PhDs running processes in Tainan Science Park.

In 1981, the booths beside Songshan Airport were selling motherboards for Hong Kong buyers to haul back. In 2026, at the TWTC Hall 1 AI robotics zone, 180 companies used live hardware on site to demo reducers, motors, and grippers. Across those 45 years in the middle, this island has been doing the same one thing: taking the "manufacturing" that developed countries outsourced away, and doing it to the point that the world can't route around it.

COMDEX died because it was held in Las Vegas — the demand side of buyers, media, product launches. CeBIT died because it was held in Hannover — European buyers, European media. Info Month withered too, because it was held in Taipei but faced Taiwan's household retail end — and that retail end got sliced away by e-commerce and phones.

Computex survived, because it's held in Taipei — the supply side of this island. Next time you see the news "Jensen Huang visits Taiwan" or "three CEOs on the same stage," you can read it this way: it's the world's compute infrastructure returning every year to the place where it is actually assembled, to make its pilgrimage.

Full version of the NVIDIA GTC Taipei 2026 keynote (NVIDIA official channel):

NVIDIA official channel: Jensen Huang's 2026 GTC Taipei keynote in full — "It's great to be back home," Vera Rubin in full production, and the rice dumplings and pork knuckles on the backdrop.

Full version of the NVIDIA Computex 2024 keynote (NVIDIA official channel):

NVIDIA official channel: Jensen Huang's 2024 COMPUTEX keynote in full — the "AI factory" concept, and the verbatim "Taiwan is the unsung hero."

Further reading:

• Semiconductor Industry — The chain holding up Computex's main stage traces back to the fabs in Hsinchu, Taichung, and Tainan
• Taiwan AI Development and Future Strategy — From server assembly to physical AI, Taiwan's AI industry is going through its second coming-of-age
• Taiwan Robotics Industry — HIWIN's Computex debut is the key snapshot of this supply chain taking shape
• Taiwan EV Supply Chain Development — Another manufacturing backbone running in parallel with AI servers
• NVIDIA in Taiwan — From Jensen Huang's Tainan childhood to Taipei's GTC Taipei main stage

Image Sources

This article uses 6 Wikimedia Commons public domain / CC-licensed images, all cached under public/article-images/technology/ to avoid hot-linking source servers; it also embeds 2 NVIDIA official channel YouTube videos (Jensen Huang's 2024 and 2026 keynotes):

• Computex Taipei sign inside Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center — Photo: Masaru Kamikura, 2011-05-31, CC BY 2.0 (hero image: the COMPUTEX floor and signage inside Nangang Exhibition Hall)
• Stan Shih at Taipei IT Month 2014 — Photo: Tony Tseng, 2014-12-05, CC BY 2.0 (Stan Shih's 2014 press interview at Taipei Info Month)
• CeBIT Hannover 2005 — Photo: Florian K, 2005-03-16, CC BY-SA 3.0 (the CeBIT 2005 crowd — world's number-one computer show, discontinued in 2018)
• TSMC factory Hsinchu — Photo: Arusanov, 2009, Public Domain (PD) (TSMC's fab in Hsinchu Science Park)
• Computex Taipei at Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center — Photo: NVIDIA Taiwan, 2016-05-31, CC BY 2.0 (exterior of the Nangang Exhibition Hall main venue)
• Jensen Huang at Computex Taipei — Photo: NVIDIA Taiwan, 2016-05-31, CC BY 2.0 (Jensen Huang speaking on the Computex stage)

The newly added EVOLVE sections (Lisa Su's 2016 main-stage Zen preview / Info Month comparison / Tom's Hardware "farewell to Taipei" B2B shift / HIWIN's cross-industry debut) do not yet have new images: an appropriately-licensed PD/CC image of Lisa Su's 2016 keynote was not found, and Tom's Hardware article images are under commercial press copyright — so both went with text-only description. In the future, if an openly licensed AMD newsroom image of the 2016 keynote is found, or an openly licensed HIWIN image of the 2026 dual-arm robot demo, they can be added.

References

1. United Daily News: Jensen Huang GTC Taipei 2026 keynote "It's great to be back home" (2026) — Reports on Jensen Huang's June 1, 2026 GTC Taipei keynote during Computex, including verbatim "It's great to be back home," "useful AI has arrived," "agentic AI has arrived" lines, the Vera Rubin/Vera CPU/N1X product announcements, and the backdrop listing Taiwanese F&B vendors like Wang Ji Fu-Cheng rice dumplings and Fu Ba Wang pork knuckles.↩
2. TradingKey: Jensen Huang's GTC Taipei 2026 Keynote — AI Enters Agentic Era (2026) — Compiles verbatim quotes from Jensen Huang's 2026 GTC Taipei keynote: "It is great to be back home," "AI agents will be the largest users of computing. Vera is the first CPU designed for that future," "Taiwan possesses the world's best supply chain ecosystem" — with additional notes on Vera Rubin's production schedule and the Blackwell Ultra upgrade.↩
3. Wikipedia: Jensen Huang — Biographical entry including his 1963 birth, growing up in Tainan, moving to the United States at age nine in 1973, education at Oregon State University and Stanford in EE, and his 1993 co-founding of NVIDIA with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.↩
4. Seeking Alpha: Nvidia highlights agentic and physical AI partnerships at Computex (2026) — Captures verbatim Jensen Huang lines at 2026 GTC Taipei — "agentic AI has arrived, that useful AI has arrived" — physical AI and key partnership positioning, and Wall Street's read of NVIDIA's strategic position at Computex 2026.↩
5. Qualcomm Newsroom / TradingView: Qualcomm says 2026 is the 'Year of Agents' — unveils Dragonfly AI data center brand (2026) — Reports on Cristiano Amon's June 1, 2026 opening keynote at Nangang Exhibition Hall 2, framing the "Year of Agents" and Qualcomm's new data center brand Dragonfly, with details on partnerships with TSMC and Taiwan ODMs.↩
6. Intel Newsroom: COMPUTEX 2026 — An Intelligent World Built on Silicon (2026) — Intel's official newsroom documenting Lip-Bu Tan's first COMPUTEX 2026 keynote as Intel CEO, including verbatim "x86 has powered data centers for more than five decades" and "compute must be reinvented beyond the socket to rackscale systems to accommodate the needs of agentic AI workloads," and covering Xeon 6+ and Rackscale Blueprints.↩
7. Business Today: COMPUTEX 2026 CEOs share stage, combined market cap exceeds USD 10 trillion (2026) — Reports on 2026 keynotes by Jensen Huang (NVIDIA), Lip-Bu Tan (Intel), and Cristiano Amon (Qualcomm), and the math behind the combined market cap of the roughly 30 speakers' companies exceeding USD 10 trillion (Lisa Su visited Taiwan but did not give a keynote that year).↩
8. TaiwanPlus: AMD's Lisa Su kicks off CEO-studded Computex show in Taipei, announces $10B Taiwan investment (2026) — Reports on Lisa Su's five-day Taiwan trip from May 20–21, 2026, announcing AMD's additional USD 10 billion investment plan in Taiwan over the coming years (including TSMC partnership and expansion of Taiwan R&D center), and noting that she skipped the main Computex keynote slot for the second year in a row — with her primary CES 2026 keynote handed to Jack Huynh.↩
9. Wikipedia: Taipei International Computer Show — Full history of Computex since its 1981 first "Taipei Computer Show" edition: 1984 renaming, 1985 TAITRA joining and rename to "Taipei International Computer Show," year-by-year scale numbers, world-ranking shifts, venue expansion timeline, and InnoVEX establishment.↩
10. Jiemian News: Forty Years of the Taipei Computer Show (Computex retrospective) — Details Computex's arc from 1981 export exhibition, 1984 Stan Shih renaming, 1985 TAITRA becoming co-organizer, 1989 becoming Asia's largest, 2003 rising to world number two, and 2012 PC shipment decline — with year-by-year scale data.↩
11. Economic Daily News: COMPUTEX 2026 scale hits new high (2026) — Reports on the 2026 dates (June 2–5), four venues, 33 countries and 1,500 exhibitors with 6,000 booths, three main pillars (AI & computing / robotics & mobility / next-gen tech), plus the new AI robotics zone at TWTC Hall 1, e-paper zone, TechXperience, and the 11-year record InnoVEX with nearly 500 startups from 23 countries.↩
12. Wikipedia: Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center — Documents Nangang Exhibition Hall 1 breaking ground in March 2005 and opening in March 2008 with a total investment of about USD 110 million, plus the subsequent Hall 2 construction and the COMPUTEX move-in timeline.↩
13. United Daily News: James Huang on COMPUTEX 2026 dual venues and AI Together (2026) — Captures TAITRA chairman James Huang's verbatim remarks: "For the first time, we adopt a dual-venue model — in addition to Nangang Exhibition Hall 1 and 2, we return to TWTC Hall 1, making it the largest edition in history"; "'AI Together' symbolizes Taiwan joining hands with global tech to co-write the new chapter of future AI civilization" — and covers the three special zones at TWTC Hall 1 (AI robotics, e-paper, TechXperience) and the physical AI / embodied intelligence agenda.↩
14. Wikipedia: COMDEX — Documents COMDEX starting in Las Vegas in 1979, peaking in 1996 with 225,000 visitors / 2,337 exhibitors, collapsing to 500 exhibitors / 40,000 visitors in 2003, and MediaLive's 2004 postponement announcement — with the full timeline of a show that never reopened.↩
15. Exhibit City News: The Rise and Fall of COMDEX 1979-2006 — Industry retrospective on COMDEX's 27-year rise and fall from 1979 to the 2003 collapse and 2004 postponement announcement, with year-by-year visitor and exhibitor scale comparisons and analysis of the dot-com bust and 9/11's impact on IT shows.↩
16. Tampa Bay Times: COMDEX tech show called off this year (2004-06-28) — Reports on MediaLive (the post-Key3Media reorganization) officially announcing the COMDEX postponement in June 2004, with details on IBM and Apple pivoting to invitation-only launch events — a key primary source for COMDEX's exit.↩
17. Wikipedia: CeBIT — Documents CeBIT's 32-year life cycle from its 1986 independence from Hannover Messe, becoming the world's number-one IT show in the 1980s-90s, peaking at 850K visitors in 2001, and Deutsche Messe's 2018 discontinuation announcement — including the November 1984 Hannover Messe decision to spin it off.↩
18. CNA: Germany's CeBIT computer show enters history (2018) — Reports on Germany's Hannover CeBIT announcing its shutdown in November 2018, analyzes declining visitor and exhibitor numbers, the market being carved up by CES / MWC / Computex / IFA, and notes that "the Taipei International Computer Show each June has a geographic advantage for Asian order-taking makers, and its scale keeps expanding."↩
19. BroadbandTVNews: German trade fair CeBIT cancelled (2018-11-28) — Deutsche Messe AG's November 28, 2018 official announcement of CeBIT's discontinuation, including the verbatim "due to declining visitor and exhibitioner attendance, CeBIT would be canceled for the foreseeable future."↩
20. Wccftech: Intel 14nm Broadwell Q4 2014 delay confirmed — Reports on Intel's 14nm Broadwell process slipping from Q2 2014 mass production to Q4 2014 and full launch in Q1 2015, including yield issues and the inside story of the "Tick-Tock" cadence being replaced by the three-year Process-Architecture-Optimization cycle from that point on.↩
21. Guru3D: More on Intel 14nm Broadwell Q4 2014 delay — Supplements Intel 14nm Broadwell delay's supply-chain impact, the Computex time-slot it was supposed to appear in, and the timeline parallel with AMD drafting its Zen turnaround plan during Intel's stumbles.↩
22. Wikipedia: Computex — English Wikipedia's Computex entry covering the 2012 first-ever annual global PC shipment decline, Computex's diminished status in media narrative during the PC winter, the 2016 InnoVEX launch, and how Computex regained attention after CeBIT's 2018 shutdown.↩
23. Wccftech: AMD Announces Zen 40% IPC Improvement Over Excavator (2016) — Reports on Lisa Su's June 1, 2016 AMD keynote at Computex main stage previewing Zen architecture, including verbatim "Zen is delivering 40 percent more IPC than our previous processor," the Summit Ridge 8-core working silicon demo, and the Q1 2017 Ryzen consumer schedule.↩
24. PC Perspective: Computex 2016 — Here It Is! Your Moment of Zen! (2016-06-01) — On-site first-hand reporting of Lisa Su's June 1, 2016 Computex keynote closing with the Zen architecture preview, including verbatim "Zen is a from scratch architectural design, for those of us who do those you know it takes a lot of work," the live demo, and the media's skeptical mood around AMD's "from scratch" promise at the time.↩
25. TweakTown: AMD will unveil Polaris GPUs and Zen APUs on June 1 (2016) — Previews AMD's June 1, 2016 Computex reveal of Polaris GPUs and Zen APUs — useful for retrospectively mapping AMD's two-year strategic layout from Lisa Su's 2014 takeover to the 2016 Zen preview.↩
26. Wikipedia: Lisa Su — Documents Lisa Su's 1969 birth in Tainan, her move at age 3 with her family to Queens, New York; her father Su Chun-huai a statistician, her mother an accountant; MIT PhD; IBM and Freescale experience; and her Zen turnaround at AMD after taking the CEO role in 2014.↩
27. Tom's Hardware: Jensen Huang and Lisa Su Family Tree — Maps out the Jensen Huang – Lisa Su family relationship: Jensen Huang's mother is Lisa Su's grandfather's younger sister; they are first cousins once removed, sharing a family origin in Tainan — and explains this rare tech CEO family tie across generations.↩
28. NVIDIA Blog: Jensen Huang Computex 2023 Keynote — NVIDIA's official blog documenting Jensen Huang's first post-pandemic in-person keynote on May 29, 2023 at Computex, announcing mass production of the Grace Hopper superchip and the DGX GH200 supercomputer (NVLink linking 256 chips, 1 exaflop) — with the theme of bringing generative AI into every data center.↩
29. BusinessWire: COMPUTEX 2016 InnoVEX 217 startups 22 countries (2016-06-03) — TAITRA's official news for the inaugural 2016 InnoVEX startup zone, including the 217 startups from 22 countries figure and TAITRA EVP Walter Yeh's verbatim "completely surpassed our expectations."↩
30. Wikipedia: Info Month — Documents Info Month's arc from 1980 "Info Week" origin, 1985 rename to "Info Month," 2001 handover by Taipei Computer Association to a coalition of eight private associations, and the observation of shrinking attendance and sales scale after the 2010s.↩
31. EE Times Taiwan: Taiwan OEMs account for nearly ninety percent of global AI server shipments (2024) — Cites research firms estimating that Taiwan makers (Quanta, Wistron, Wiwynn, Inventec, Foxconn, etc.) account for nearly ninety percent of global AI server shipments, and explains TSMC's production of over ninety percent of the world's most advanced chips and CoWoS advanced packaging as the AI compute bottleneck in the supply chain.↩
32. Anue: Foxconn AI server OEM market share and OEM margin analysis — Reports on Foxconn's roughly 40% global AI server OEM share, ranked number one globally, and explains the electronics OEM industry's "gross three to four" and "Maoshan Taoists" low margin structure — contrasted with the high gross margins of upstream TSMC and NVIDIA.↩
33. TechNews: AI server capacity relocation and Taiwan makers' multi-site layout (2025) — Reports on the global capacity layout of Taiwan's AI server OEMs, including Wiwynn having 70% of its capacity in Mexico, Wistron and Quanta setting up US plants, and Compal's "China Plus N" distributed strategy across Taiwan, China, Vietnam, India, Mexico, the US, with supplementary gross margin structures from Wistron and Quanta's recent earnings calls.↩
34. Commercial Times: HIWIN debuts at COMPUTEX to build Physical AI (2026) — Reports on precision motion powerhouse HIWIN Technologies (2049) making its cross-industry debut at COMPUTEX 2026, showcasing dual-arm logistics robots, humanoid robot core modules, smart grippers, and PLP semiconductor smart equipment solutions at the TWTC Hall 1 AI robotics zone, backed by its in-house ball screws, harmonic reducers, motors, drivers, and control technology powering linear and rotary actuation modules.↩
35. COMPUTEX TAIPEI official: 2026 returns to TWTC, sets up first AI robotics zone — TAITRA's official news documenting COMPUTEX 2026's return to Taipei's TWTC Hall 1, the first-ever AI robotics zone with over 180 exhibitors gathering "the full industrial chain from sensors, motors, reducers to system integration" and live hardware demos, and chairman James Huang's verbatim remark about "leaping from a global tech manufacturing powerhouse to a 'global AI solutions center.'"↩
36. Commercial Times: COMPUTEX 2026 Taiwan booths and liquid cooling as standard (2026) — Reports on Foxconn's largest booth showing the Vera Rubin NVL72 compute rack and robots at 2026, Quanta and Wistron's booth sizes, and — with GPU compute density up and air cooling hitting physical limits — liquid cooling becoming the standard display item at every major OEM. The supply chain extends from assembling AI servers to assembling AI robots.↩
37. Tom's Hardware: Unfiltered Computex 2026 Day 4 — the B2B shift, and we say farewell to Taipei (2026-06-05) — A joint wrap-up piece by Shields / Kampman / Roach / Alcorn, with the verbatim week-long conclusion: "Computex 2026 had far more B2B-focused companies in attendance, whereas in the past, the show typically featured strictly consumer products and companies that feed into that ecosystem."↩
38. Tom's Hardware: Unfiltered Computex 2026 Day 0 — peek behind the curtain (2026-06-01) — Jeffrey Kampman's pre-opening piece with the verbatim "In a world where nobody is launching truly new graphics cards, my Computex week will almost certainly be defined by data center products, integrated graphics processors, and AI accelerators of various shapes and sizes," foreshadowing the consumer-end-abandoned narrative.↩
39. PC Gamer: Computex 2026 has really highlighted the fact that PC gaming tech isn't all about gaming anymore (2026) — PC Gamer's on-site observation piece looking back at Computex 2026 from a gamer's perspective — "PC gaming tech isn't all about gaming anymore" — capturing the show floor scenes and mood.↩
40. Tom's Hardware: IDC expects PC prices to jump 8% in 2026 due to memory shortages (2026) — Cites the IDC report on Q1 2026 consumer DRAM up 110%, SSD up 147%, and 32GB DDR5 kits pushed from around USD 100 to above USD 350.↩
41. Tom's Hardware: AMD RDNA 5 gaming GPUs coming late 2027 according to AIBs at Computex — On-site reveal from AIB partners at Computex 2026 that AMD's RDNA 5 gaming GPUs are pushed to the second half of 2027, with NVIDIA's next consumer GPUs in the same window — hard evidence of the consumer end being left behind.↩
42. The Reporter: Data center electricity and Taiwan's energy stress test (2026) — Huang Hao-min and Sun Wen-lin's in-depth investigation of Taiwan's data center electricity, with the counterintuitive comparison of data center electricity at only 0.5% of national consumption in 2025 vs. semiconductor manufacturing at nearly 15% (42.38 billion kWh), the 2024–2030 cumulative AI (incl. data centers) new-load estimate of about 1.85 GW, and Taipower's 2024 policy of freezing 5MW+ data center power applications north of Taoyuan.↩
43. DCD: TSMC could account for 24% of Taiwan's electricity consumption by 2030 (cite S&P Global) — Cites S&P Global's modeling estimate: TSMC used about 8% of Taiwan's national electricity in 2024 and 16% of the industrial sector, and could climb toward 24% by 2030 as wafer capacity climbs 90% over 2023 to 794 GW.↩
44. PTS News: 2030 nationwide electricity consumption estimated to grow 13%, AI power demand up 8x (2024-07-15) — Cites the Bureau of Energy's 2023 National Power Supply Situation Report, with verbatim: "AI technology electricity demand is estimated to grow from 240,000 kW in 2023 to 2,240,000 kW in 2028, a full 2,000,000 kW increase — an 8-fold rise."↩
45. Business Next: Taipower blocks new data center power supply north of Taoyuan (2024-08-26) — Reports on Taipower's early-August 2024 bombshell policy of freezing 5MW+ data center power applications north of Taoyuan, with the key data of 2023 northern electricity consumption at 93 billion kWh vs. northern generation at 75 billion kWh and the roughly 20-billion-kWh gap, and Tseng Wen-sheng's verbatim addition that "the policy only targets data center facilities."↩
46. Lawfare: Taiwan's Silicon Shield Is Turning Into a Target (2025) — A joint analysis published by US law-and-policy outlet Lawfare and CSET, arguing that from 2025 onward, the "silicon shield" concept is reversing: Taiwan's semiconductor irreplaceability is shifting from a deterrent shield against force to a targeted strategic mark — includes verbatim reasoning from Powers-Riggs and Bresnick on Beijing's strategic motivations.↩
47. CSET Georgetown: Taiwan's Silicon Shield Is Turning Into a Target (2025) — The same joint analysis with Lawfare, authored by Powers-Riggs and Bresnick, including the verbatim reasoning on Beijing's strategic motivation: "Beijing may view going on the offensive as its best shot at accomplishing two strategic objectives at once: achieving 'reunification' and leveling the AI playing field."↩
48. Newsweek: Is Taiwan's Silicon Shield a Security Guarantee or a Target? (2025-01-22 Kerry Brown book excerpt) — An excerpt from Kerry Brown's book Why Taiwan Matters, with verbatim: "In the current scenario, TSMC's position makes China covet Taiwan even more" and "For all the talk by Taiwanese officials of the 'silicon shield' protecting them, reliance on it as an absolute guarantee of the island's safety and security would be foolhardy."↩
49. Wikipedia: Compal Electronics — Compal's entry, documenting production lines across China's Kunshan, Vietnam, the US, Brazil, Poland, Mexico, and India (added in 2024) — seven countries — a Taiwan poster case for the "China Plus N" distributed strategy.↩
50. Mexico News Daily: Foxconn to invest US$241M in AI server manufacturing in Chihuahua (2024-08-22) — Reports on Foxconn subsidiary Foxconn Industrial Internet (FII) announcing its August 2024 additional USD 241.2 million expansion of AI server production in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico — the plant originally started up in 2005.↩
51. SCMP / Reuters: Foxconn builds world's largest Nvidia superchip production facility in Mexico (2024-10-08) — Reports on Foxconn senior VP Benjamin Ting (丁朗哲) at Foxconn Tech Day on October 8, 2024, announcing "We're building the largest GB200 production facility on the planet" and "The demand is awfully huge," with about USD 900 million investment, a monthly capacity of 20,000 Blackwell servers, an annual output of 240,000, and the Guadalajara Mexico plant scheduled to come online in 2025–26.↩
52. Dallas Fed: Taiwan firms key to nearshoring and reshoring to support AI boom (2025) — The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas's 2025 trade report, capturing Inventec / Pegatron / Wiwynn's USD 75-million-to-USD 250-million plants in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, Quanta's Monterrey expansion for AI servers and EV parts, Mexico's 2025 automatic data processing machine exports breaking through USD 85 billion, and Taiwan makers' 2025 announced FDI to Texas of USD 5.3 billion.↩
53. Z2Data: Why 'China Plus One' Has Become 'Anywhere but China' (2025-03-13 Michael Mariani) — Supply chain research firm Z2Data's analysis, with verbatim "What began as the cautious 'China Plus One' strategy — where companies maintained China operations while establishing backup manufacturing elsewhere — has evolved into something far more decisive: 'Anywhere but China'," plus the key timeline and motivations of Taiwan makers' distributed footprint.↩
54. The Diplomat: Taiwan Is Rewiring North America's AI Hardware Chain (2025-08) — Analysis from a geostrategic angle of how Taiwan's AI hardware chain is rewiring North American production geography (Mexico / Texas / Wisconsin), supplementing the Dallas Fed 2025 data with policy drivers and Taiwan makers' investment decision patterns.↩