- Super Micro Computer, a Fortune 500 Silicon Valley tech giant that manufactures high-efficiency servers and data centers, is setting its sights on expanding in the Midwest and East coast regions and hopes to stave off the hit from higher prices due to President Trump’s tariffs, said CEO Charles Liang on Thursday. The company recently partnered with xAI and its Grok team to build a data center in Tennessee.
Super Micro Computer is looking to turn the page after an arduous slog through a host of accounting and finance issues. The data center manufacturer is working toward a $40 billion revenue target and CEO Charles Liang announced plans to expand from its San Jose campus to new locations in the Midwest and East Coast. Super Micro is in talks with potential partners in the Middle East, he added. Liang spoke at the HumanX AI conference in Las Vegas this week.
He touted the Memphis data center, and said the company assembles its racks in San Jose before it ships components out to customers who can then “plug and play.” The company is a key piece of the AI ecosystem, and its fortunes have risen along with those of Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and others as demand for data center servers needed for operating and training AI models has soared. Liang, who founded the company in 1993 with five people before it grew into a $23 billion Fortune 500 player, counts Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang as a friend, and Super Micro’s servers are packed with Nvidia’s highly coveted GPUs.
In fact, the new 750,000 square foot xAI Colossus cluster Super Micro built for Elon Musk’s xAI Grok team counts 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, the company said in a recent case study.
“It took Elon and Super Micro only 122 days to finish,” said Liang, adding that it would usually take a year or longer to build such a data center. “He pushed me a lot, and he has high standards.”
And despite the aftermath of DeepSeek and China’s Manus AI, comingled with talk that companies will scale back on spending, Liang said what’s happening now is that the dynamic environment in tech is being brought back into “balance.”
Ultimately, however, he predicted demand will continue to surge over the next five to 10 years as companies seek the best, most efficient products.
“This AI boom has been very big and AI now is so powerful,” said Liang. “But AI can be much more powerful, much faster, smarter, and more user-friendly…. There’s more room for AI to grow.”
He also noted that President Trump’s 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports aren’t likely to be as meaningful a hit to the company because it has kept its operations U.S.-based. Liang said the company also plans to leverage its footprint in Taiwan. One of its major contract manufacturers, Ablecom, is based in Taiwan along with its distributor, Compuware. The two companies’ CEOs, Steve Liang and Bill Liang, respectively, are Charle’s Liang’s brothers.
Those and other related-party transactions led to a short seller report last year amid other accounting red flags that catapulted Super Micro into a financial-reporting gridlock in which it delayed its annual 10-K and quarterly financial filings. Its auditor EY quit in the middle of an engagement and Super Micro was in danger of being delisted from Nasdaq, which would have been the second time such a thing occurred.
Last month, Super Micro issued belated annual financial reports and said its former accounting firm was to blame for the delay. The company has since been hit with at least five lawsuits and faces a probe from the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Super Micro is cooperating with regulators.
