Photo/Super Micro Computer website

The AI feast ignited by ChatGPT has been ongoing for over a year, with NVIDIA being the absolute focus of this feast. In fact, besides NVIDIA, there is another winner behind this frenzy, namely Super Micro Computer, which was founded by Chinese-American Charles Liang.

Super Micro Computer, headquartered in San Jose, California, primarily offers products including servers and storage systems. It is one of the top three server manufacturers globally, with manufacturing and operation centers in America, Asia, and Europe, and over 4,000 employees worldwide. NVIDIA, Meta, and Tesla are all clients of Super Micro Computer.

Following the surge of generative AI, Super Micro Computer’s stock price soared. By the last trading day of 2023, its closing price reached $284.26, an increase of more than seven times from its lowest point in 2022 ($34.11, with a market value of $1.893 billion at the time).

Entering 2024, Super Micro Computer showed even more rapid growth, with its highest stock price breaking through the $1,000 mark. As of February 22, year to date, Micro Computer has increased 241.75%, with a market value of $54.5 billion. Looking at the data from the past 12 months, Super Micro Computer’s stock price increase once reached 980%, even surpassing the “seven tech stock giants” of the US stock market. The title of “the most bullish AI stock” was thus established, and Charles Liang became the third Chinese person to make a name in the core AI circle following Jensen Huang and Simon Su. According to Bloomberg, as of February 22, 2024, Charles Liang’s personal wealth was $6.5 billion.

The market believes that the soaring stock price of Super Micro Computer this year is due to the strong demand for its servers. The development of AI not only requires good chips, databases, and algorithms, but also better servers to integrate these things.

As Super Micro Computer’s stock price skyrocketed, many people began to wonder who Charles Liang really is.

Charles Liang, now 66 years old, was once selected as one of the 25 most successful Chinese-Americans by Forbes. Unlike Jensen Huang who immigrated to the United States as a child, Charles Liang is a native Taiwanese. He graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Taipei Institute of Technology (the predecessor of Taipei University of Technology) and went to the University of Texas at Arlington to study electrical engineering in 1984. After graduation, Charles Liang worked in several computer companies, and from 1991 to 1993, he served as the president and chief design engineer at Micro Center Computer, a motherboard design and manufacturing company.

In the summer of 1993, Charles Liang decided to start his own business and founded Super Micro Computer in Silicon Valley with his wife, Sara Liu. Sara Liu still serves as the company’s vice president and board member.

When they first started the business, people were not optimistic. His friends in the industry at the time believed that the timing, location, and industry he chose were all wrong. He later said in an interview, “I am just driven by a belief, and I want to make dreams come true.”

Charles Liang revealed that at that time, everyone was winning with product prices. However,  he believed that product quality was the king, so he kept improving the products, hoping to make products that even the most picky customers in Silicon Valley would be satisfied with.

At the beginning of the establishment of Super Micro Computer, Charles Liang decided to carry out “one-stop” service. In 1995, it launched the world’s first server motherboard that could carry two CPUs, and soon after, it developed a server motherboard that could carry four CPUs. Compared with the early practice of basically only being able to carry one CPU on the motherboard, this innovation of the motherboard was quite forward-looking for the technology industry at the time.

In 2022, Super Micro Computer decided to fully turn to AI servers and entered the high-speed computing track. In 2023, the company transitioned to liquid cooling. This technology can reduce the operating expenses of data centers by more than 40%, and its liquid cooling server technology has also won the favor of NVIDIA. Charles Liang predicts that more than 20% of data centers worldwide will need a liquid cooling architecture to effectively cool AI servers.

With its accumulation in the server field, Super Micro Computer has become one of the fastest-growing companies in the AI industry. In a research report released this week, Rosenblatt Securities predicts that Super Micro Computer’s stock price still has more than 60% upside.

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