MSI confirms PCB factory in China caught fire

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MSI confirms no one was hurt in the incident and production is already back up-and-running.

Smoke billows out of an MSI factory
(Image credit: Reddit)

Update: MSI has issued the following statement regarding the fire at its MSI Baoan factory in Shenzhen:

"A fire accident occurred in MSI Baoan factory in Shenzhen on November 5th afternoon. MSI activated its emergency measures and notified the fire department to deal with it immediately. No injuries were caused and the production line was not damaged. In the future, MSI will continue to strengthen the education and training of personnel. At present, all units are operating normally. Thank you for your concern."

Original story: A video recently posted to Reddit with the caption "MSI HQ in China apparently just went up in flames There goes my 3080" shows a fire at an MSI plant in Kunshan. While not actually MSI's headquarters—that would be in Taiwan, where the hardware manufacturer is based—the plant is a significant site, housing two factories and an R&D center when it was inaugurated in 2003.

As yet, we don't know if anyone was hurt in the fire or what effect it could have on production. So no, there's no way of knowing if your GeForce RTX 3080 just went up in smoke.

MSI's CEO, Charles Chiang, died just four months ago after falling from the seventh floor of a building in Taiwan's capital, Taipei.

Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.