NVIDIA has announced that it will not be participating at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC), despite sponsoring the annual event. The GPU maker’s decision, unsurprisingly, stems from fear of the novel Coronavirus outbreak.
As per its official blog:
“Given public health risks around the coronavirus, ensuring the safety of our colleagues, partners and customers is our highest concern. MWC Barcelona is one of the world’s most important technology conferences. We’ve been looking forward to sharing our work in AI, 5G, and vRAN with the industry. We regret not attending, but believe this is the right decision.”
NVIDIA is one of several major brands to officially withdraw from MWC 2020 due to the Coronavirus outbreak. LG and ZTE were the first two major electronics brand to announce their withdrawal, although the latter did an about turn on its decision to pull out shortly after.
Some may find it odd that NVIDIA still maintains a vested interest in mobile products, even after it technically stopped developing and producing mobile products for nearly a decade. However, the brand’s GPU technology is used extensively in the development of mobile speech recognition and camera optimisations. Through neural network training and design, done through its hardware.
On that note, this year’s MWC at Barcelona is expected to be filled with announcements of flagship devices with 5G technology, as well as other devices powered by the new generation of wireless technology.
