Super Micro Computer spent over 30 years in one of the least sexy segments of the tech landscape: building high-performance servers. But lately the company has caught the broader AI wave, and it’s now plenty sexy.
In the past five years, Super Micro’s shares have soared an astounding 3,454%. And over that time its annual fiscal revenue has doubled to $7.12 billion, enough to earn it a Fortune 500 debut at No. 498 this year.
The company’s growth is being fueled by huge demand for data center servers used for training and operating artificial intelligence models. With more businesses using AI for more tasks, revenue for some server manufacturers is rapidly increasing.
The truth is that Super Micro has much in common with Nvidia, another company that flew under the radar for years until its AI chips won big in the AI boom and its shares skyrocketed. Both Super Micro and Nvidia were created in 1993, and both continue to be led by their cofounders. The two CEOs, Super Micro’s Charles Liang and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, are longtime friends, while the headquarters of their respective companies are just a 15-minute drive from each other across Silicon Valley.
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Super Micro Computer's debut rank on the Fortune 500 list.
Another key ingredient in Super Micro’s secret sauce: It has managed to fill its servers with—you guessed it—Nvidia AI chips, even though Nvidia GPUs have been in short supply industrywide. For now, at least, the close ties between the CEOs seem to help keep the spigot open, despite Liang’s joking command to Huang at a conference in Taiwan last summer: “Give me more chips!”
Of course, Super Micro has had its ups and downs. For example, its latest quarterly revenue, announced in April, fell slightly below analysts’ expectations, and, in reaction, Super Micro’s shares sank 14% in one day. But in that same announcement, Super Micro affirmed that it expects to more than double its revenue year over year in fiscal 2024, to between $14.7 billion and $15.1 billion.
Unruffled, Liang voiced optimism that his company’s AI-fueled growth would endure. “Super Micro is at the forefront of the current AI revolution,” he said during a conference call with investors. He then shot down the idea that the revolution—and his company’s current good fortune—is just a temporary bubble that will eventually deflate, predicting that “AI growth will continue for many quarters, if not many years, to come.”
This article appears in the June/July 2024 issue of Fortune.
