Charles Liang, CEO of Supermicro, predicts that “the AI revolution can be bigger than the industrial revolution,” and the astonishing growth of Supermicro just in the past year seems to bear out this prediction. Supermicro revenue grew by 200% year over year in the third fiscal quarter, and it’s expected to grow another 152% by the end of the year. Liang spoke at VB Transform 2024 about the massive wave of profitability the company has experienced and the trends that are underpinning investor confidence that the AI revolution, and its profitability for well-positioned companies, will continue.
And Supermicro is better positioned than most companies. AI depends on the GPUs that companies like Nvidia (mostly Nvidia) are producing, but without Supermicro, you only have GPUs. Supermicro ships clusters and racks of networked, cooled and pooled AI infrastructure (including GPUs) to fuel continuous demand for its best-in-class building block solutions that let customers customize every component of their platform.
“As a Silicon Valley-based company, we are able to work with all the technology leaders from Nvidia, Intel, AMD and Broadcom and so on, so our engineering team works with their team from early morning to midnight if their product needs to be developed,” Liang said. “And we work with all the major software companies very closely and all our leading customers to brainstorm and design the most optimized platforms for them, based on our building block solution, with the best time to market.”
Preparing for the future of AI
“This AI boom, I believe that’s just at a beginning stage,” Liang said. “So, we are preparing capacity to support the whole industry around the world.”
In Silicon Valley alone, they’re building and shipping 4,000 racks per month. About 1,000 of that number offers a liquid cooling solution – and they’re ramping up right now to ship about 2K liquid-cooled racks a month. Liquid cooling will be an essential factor going forward, Liang added, now that power constraints are rearing their ugly head. Right now, data centers consume massive amounts of power, and utilities are having a hard time keeping up. But liquid cooling is the answer moving forward, Liang says. In fact, Elon Musk is using Supermicro’s liquid cooling solution for xAI.
“With liquid cooling, our data center solutions consume 30 to 40% less energy, so that not just saves customers energy cost, but also enables customers to deploy 30% more computing power with the same power budget,” he explained. “Our goal is to make liquid cooling at least 20% to 30% of the whole data center deployment in next 12 months.”
