Supermicro CEO: ‘We Are In What I Call An AI Revolution’
Summary
That company, Supermicro, is in a part of the IT industry that only a few years ago was ignored because of a widespread belief that the manufacturing of “commodity” hardware like motherboards, servers, storage, networking, and PCs had little future next to such fast-growing areas as the cloud. Charles Liang, Supermicro’s founder, president, and CEO, told CRN that he has been involved in some form of the AI business since he immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan 38 years ago, when he was involved in medical expert systems, which are computer systems that apply intelligence to provide accurate medical diagnostic information. Indeed, the two companies’ headquarters were within 10 miles of each other, which helped foster a 30-plus-year relationship wherein Supermicro’s motherboards and systems incorporated Nvidia chips, particularly its GPUs which have become the base on which much of today’s AI infrastructure is built. And we found that it’s not easy for our partners, including distributors, SIs (service integrators), and resellers, to meet their customers’ demands quickly. Speaking about Supermicro’s offshore business, the United States and China are having some geopolitical issues in terms of technology transfers and sales.