Huge Fire Reported at MSI’s Chinese HQ

MSI represents one of the largest hardware and peripheral manufacturers in the world and as such, they clearly have both a highly sensitive and exceptionally busy production line. It seems, however, that the company may have a major supply issue on their hands moving into 2021. – Why? Well, following various reports on both Twitter and Reddit, one of their biggest plants in Kunshan China has just had a colossally huge fire!

We’re having issues with the video embed of the event, but if it doesn’t show, click here to check it out. Failing which, we have included a crudely edited image of it below (it was unfortunately recorded in portrait, so no, that van on the right isn’t actually 20′ long).

MSI HQ in China apparently just went up in flames There goes my 3080 from r/pcmasterrace

MSI Plant Has Huge Fire!

The Kunshan plant represents a major manufacturing center for MSI and, as such, while the images of the blaze don’t give us a particularly detailed account (and MSI certainly hasn’t said anything yet) it definitely looks more than likely that it’s not only a pretty substantial fire but that, in terms of consumer products, this may have a huge impact on their supply lines throughout 2021.

That hasn’t, of course, stopped some people coming up with some amusing theories about what caused the fire. Yes, somebody has associated their own failed AMD Ryzen 5800X overclocking attempts with the inferno. Old jokes die hard I guess.

What Do We Think?

This is pretty fresh news and, as such, very little detail has emerged about this incident yet except what you can garner from the images/video above. One thing, however, is abundantly clear. This doesn’t just look like a small isolated situation. If anything, it looks like a significant portion of the plant may be ablaze, and given the impact such disruption could have, let us firstly hope that no one was or has been hurt, but on a second and significantly less important factor, let’s hope that it doesn’t impact their product availability as we enter a new year!

Edit – MSI has claimed that the fire was a relatively small affair and production (believed to be motherboards and graphics cards) was not affected. We’re not entirely certain we buy into this, however, as presumably they had to shut it down with the fire alarm and production line shutdowns, no matter how brief, can cause huge problems when it comes to turning them back on (as you have hundreds of products midway through being put together that, generally speaking, have to be scrapped).

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!