Tech Conferences

The tech conferences worth knowing

Tech events split by the stack you work on more than by size. A cloud architect, a security analyst and a chip designer would each pick a different show. Here are the main ones by type, with who each is built for. Dates for all of them are in the list above.

The big cross-industry shows

• CES (Las Vegas, January). Best for: anyone tracking consumer tech, from devices and AI to vehicle tech and digital health. The Consumer Technology Association runs it, and it's the show the rest of the year's launches get measured against.
• MWC Barcelona (Barcelona, March). Best for: mobile operators, device makers and telecom vendors. GSMA runs it, and it's where 5G, IoT and handset news lands.
• TechCrunch Disrupt (San Francisco, October). Best for: startup founders and the investors and press who follow them.
• SXSW (Austin, March). Best for: people working where tech meets media, film and music. The conference runs alongside the film and music festivals.
• GITEX Global (Dubai, December) and Computex (Taipei, June). Best for: the Middle East and Asian markets. GITEX leans to startups and enterprise; Computex is computing hardware and semiconductors.

Cloud & enterprise IT

• AWS re:Invent (Las Vegas, late November into December). Best for: cloud engineers and developers on AWS. It's Amazon Web Services' own conference.
• Microsoft Ignite (San Francisco, November) and Google Cloud Next (Las Vegas, April). Best for: IT pros and developers on the Microsoft or Google stack.
• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America (Salt Lake City, November). Best for: platform and DevOps engineers working with Kubernetes. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation runs it, so it's vendor-neutral.
• Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo (Orlando, October). Best for: CIOs and IT leaders setting strategy and budgets rather than doing hands-on work.
• Red Hat Summit (Boston, May) and Oracle AI World (Las Vegas, October). Best for: customers of those platforms who want roadmaps, labs and training.

AI & data

• NVIDIA GTC (San Jose, March). Best for: AI developers and researchers building on accelerated computing. NVIDIA uses it for major product announcements.
• Data + AI Summit (San Francisco, June). Best for: data engineers and ML practitioners. Databricks runs it, and the sessions are hands-on.
• The AI Summit New York (December) and AI & Big Data Expo North America (San Jose, June). Best for: business leaders looking for applied, enterprise AI and the vendors that sell it.
• NeurIPS (December). Best for: machine-learning researchers. It's an academic research conference, not a vendor expo. See the AI conferences page for the full list.

Cybersecurity

• RSA Conference (San Francisco, April). Best for: security leaders and buyers. It has the biggest vendor expo of the security year.
• Black Hat USA and DEF CON (Las Vegas, back to back in late July and August). Best for: security researchers and practitioners. Black Hat is technical briefings and training; DEF CON is the hacker convention with talks and contests.
• Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit (National Harbor, June). Best for: CISOs and risk leaders planning strategy.
• Infosecurity Europe (London, June). Best for: the European security market. See the cybersecurity conferences page for more.

Electronics, chips & hardware

• SEMICON West (San Francisco, October). Best for: the semiconductor supply chain: chipmakers, equipment and materials suppliers. SEMI runs it.
• DAC (San Jose, July) and DesignCon (Santa Clara, February). Best for: chip, board and systems design engineers.
• Embedded World (Nuremberg, March) and electronica (Munich, November). Best for: embedded and electronic-components engineers and buyers, at two of Europe's biggest electronics fairs.
• InfoComm (Orlando, June). Best for: pro AV integrators and buyers: displays, conferencing and digital signage.