Supermicro’s Charles Liang Reflects on 30 Years and Looks Forward to Significant Expansion

Supermicro has been and continues to be my dream work. As we celebrate our 30th anniversary, I wanted to reflect on where we came from, but more importantly, where we are going. Supermicro continues to be a leader in designing, manufacturing, and delivering the most advanced server systems on Earth that address the most demanding needs of enterprises, research organizations, and large data centers worldwide. Our relentless focus on being first to market with the newest and best performing technologies has been driven by our Building Block Solutions® design methodology and, coupled with our commitment to green computing, has enabled us to become a fast-growing total IT solution provider to customers everywhere.

Thirty years ago, Supermicro began designing the best motherboards and the most energy efficient power supplies for many companies producing servers and personal computers. These companies wanted to improve their systems for the best performance and earliest time to market. Supermicro has always been focused on doing our best to support our customers. As we grew in size, we started to provide customers with complete systems optimized for different workloads. Our systems are designed for high performance and performance per dollar while always offering customers new technology and time to market advantages. As a result, we became a leading supplier of entire application-optimized systems that address a wide range of workloads and vertical industries. We then saw the opportunity and the value in providing complete rack level system integration and total solutions with our plug-and-play (PnP) offerings.

This brings us to where we are today in what we call “Supermicro 3.0”. Rack Plug and Play is now a cornerstone of our strategy, enabling us to deliver clusters of systems that customers merely need to connect to power and a network.

Additionally, Supermicro continues to be committed to designing the industry’s most energy efficient systems. This commitment started in 2004 while watching the movie, “The Day After Tomorrow”. Based on the movie’s story about how terrible global warming is caused by humans’ high energy consumption from fossil fuels, I decided that Supermicro should design high efficiency power supplies and then entire systems and data centers.

This mission translated into lower costs for data center operators through lower energy bills, which subsequently reduces fossil fuel power plant emissions. Our mission has become a focal point as the thermal challenge of modern CPUs and GPUs escalates with each generation. Today, we see liquid cooling emerging as a necessity for these workloads. Our engineering teams have designed the entire liquid cooling solution at a system, rack, and data center scale, eliminating risk and reducing the time from concept to implementation at customer sites. We hope and anticipate that 20% or more of worldwide data centers will need to and will move to liquid cooling in the next several years to efficiently cool data centers that use the latest AI server technology. I see liquid cooling and free air cooling as becoming much more popular in the near future because of the TCO savings and awareness of the environmental challenges we all face.

We have been designing and building products in the US from the day the company was founded. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, proximity to strategic technology partners is critical to creating the best products and being the first to market. By working together with our key CPU and GPU partners, top customers, and the greatest minds in the industry, we are creating innovative servers for the edge to cloud data centers. As a result of this collaboration, we see a robust future almost without limitation. We continue to expand our manufacturing footprint across our facilities in Silicon Valley, Taiwan, The Netherlands, and soon in Malaysia to meet customers’ requirements in growing volumes and for fast delivery.

Now that AI is becoming pervasive, Supermicro continues to be committed to being the industry leader in creating the most performant and energy efficient systems from the data center to the edge. We aim to bring a world class infrastructure broadly available to organizations of all sizes for many large enterprises and super scale CSPs.

Our existing and emerging customers continue to love and desire Supermicro’s complete IT Solutions for their data centers and out to the edge, especially for data centers that are energy and power capacity constrained because our solutions consume less power (greener). By integrating and optimizing hardware and software and scaling them to the data center, we give our customers early time to market, which results in enhanced productivity. The racks and clusters we develop with close collaboration with our users are thoroughly tested with installed applications to their specifications. By delivering complete and ready to go clusters, customers just have to plug into power sources and network cables, and they are ready to become productive and serve their customers and employees. We have the ability to design, build, validate, and deliver thousands of fully populated racks of the latest servers, storage, networking systems, and management/security tools to customers worldwide within a week. Our strategic decision to expand our manufacturing facilities to multiple continents enables us to quickly deliver what our customers require anywhere on Earth.

We continue to work very closely with the leading CPU, GPU, Memory, Storage, and other partners worldwide to deliver the latest technology to customers in a wide range of industries and for any workload. Our portfolio continues to expand from the data center to the edge, which addresses the new normal: data produced at the edge can be acted upon at the edge, to data centers that excel at AI training and data analytics, and everything in between.

We have been preparing to be a much more powerful, energy-saving, and quicker technology time to market IT and AI solution company, which we call “Supermicro 4.0”. This effort will fuel a new and enormous growth phase in the coming years. This is an extremely exciting time at Supermicro, and I look forward to writing this new chapter of Supermicro with all of you!

Charles Liang, founder, president and CEO of Supermicro