Super Micro Computer, Inc., dba Supermicro, is an

information technology Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve, and exchange all kinds of Data (computing), data . and information. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information te ...

company based in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popu ...

. It has manufacturing operations in the

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, the

Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...

and at its Science and Technology Park in

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...

. Founded on November 1, 1993, Supermicro is a provider of high-performance and high-efficiency servers, server management softwares, and storage systems for various markets, including enterprise data centers,

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

, 5G and edge computing. Supermicro’s stock trades under the ticker symbol SMCI on the Nasdaq exchange. Supermicro fiscal year 2022 revenues were $5.2 billion and Supermicro has 4,607 employees globally.

History

Formation and initial public offering

In 1993, Supermicro began as a 5 person operation run by Charles Liang alongside his wife and company treasurer, Chiu-Chu Liu, known as Sara. In 1996, the company opened a manufacturing subsidiary in Taiwan, Ablecom, which is run by Charles’s brother, Steve Liang. Charles Liang and his wife own close to 31 percent of Ablecom, while Steve Liang and other members of the family own close to 50 percent. In 1998, Supermicro opened a subsidiary in the Netherlands. In 2006, Supermicro plead guilty to a felony charge and paid a $150,000 fine due to a violation of a United States embargo against the sale of computer systems to Iran. On March 8, 2007, Supermicro raised $64 million in an initial public offering, selling 8 million shares at $8 a share. In 2009, Supermicro sold about $720 million worth of computer servers and related products and employed almost 1,100 people.

International expansion

In May 2010, Supermicro further expanded into Europe with the opening of its system integration logistics center in the Netherlands. In January 2012, Supermicro opened its Taiwan Science and Technology Park, totalling $99 million in construction costs. Later in 2012, Supermicro debuted it’s 2U and 4U/Tower platforms. In 2014, the GCIC Center Tokyo Institute of Technology’s TSUBAME-KFC supercomputer, from Supermicro, was ranked first on the Green 500 list. In September 2014, Supermicro moved its corporate headquarters to the former ''

Mercury News ''The Mercury News'' (formerly ''San Jose Mercury News'', often locally known as ''The Merc'') is a morning daily newspaper published in San Jose, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is published by the Bay Area News Group, a subsidia ...

'' headquarters in North

along Interstate 880, naming the campus Supermicro Green Computing Park. In 2017, the company completed a new 182,000 square-foot manufacturing building on the campus. The main building was designed by Warren B. Heid in the

modernist Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...

style, which was common for commercial buildings in the 1960s, and built by the Carl N. Swenson Company. During the time it served as the ''Mercury News''s headquarters, the main building was expanded from to . Until recently, a bronze sculpture, ''Chandelier'' by John Jagger, hung from the ceiling of an elliptical

loggia In architecture, a loggia ( , usually , ) is a covered exterior gallery or corridor, usually on an upper level, but sometimes on the ground level of a building. The outer wall is open to the elements, usually supported by a series of columns ...

at the entrance. The loggia is distinguished by a series of metal columns and the moat that surrounds it. In 2016, Supermicro sent 30,000 MicroBlade servers to a Silicon Valley data center with a claimed PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.06. While Supermicro did not name the customer, it was likely Intel, who opened a similar data center in November 2015 with a PUE of 1.06. A subsidiary of Supermicro, Super Micro Computer B.V., started a joint venture with Fiberhome Telecommunication Technologies Co. Ltd., a Chinese company that is on a U.S. government blacklist for alleged involvement in human rights violations and the suppression, imprisonment and spying on Uyghurs in Xinjiang. In 2017, the company's (at the time) newly-constructed manufacturing facility in San Jose was designed to meet LEED gold certification. On October 4, 2018, ''

Bloomberg Businessweek ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'', is an American weekly business magazine published fifty times a year. Since 2009, the magazine is owned by New York City-based Bloomberg L.P. The magazine debuted in New York City ...

'' published a report, citing unnamed corporate and governmental sources, which claimed that the Chinese People's Liberation Army had forced Supermicro's Chinese sub-contractors to add microchips with

hardware backdoor Hardware backdoors are backdoors in hardware, such as code inside hardware or firmware of computer chips. The backdoors may be directly implemented as hardware Trojans in the integrated circuit. Hardware backdoors are intended to undermine ...

s to its servers. The report claimed that the compromised servers had been sold to U.S. government divisions (including the

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

and

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) and contractors and at least 30 commercial clients. Supermicro denied the report, stating that they had not been contacted by government agencies and were unaware of any investigation. On October 22 Supermicro announced that "despite the lack of any proof that a malicious hardware chip exists" it was reviewing its motherboards for potential spy chips in response to the article. On October 9, 2018, ''Bloomberg'' issued a second report, alleging that Supermicro-manufactured datacenter servers of an unnamed U.S. telecom firm had been compromised by a hardware implant on an

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1 ...

connector. Supermicro filed a letter with the Securities and Exchange Commission stating that it was "confident" that "no malicious hardware chip had been implanted" during the manufacture of its motherboards.

Recent developments

In February 2021, ''Bloomberg Business'' reported that Supermicro had been compromised since 2011,

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keeping it a secret to gather intelligence about China and warning only a small number of potential targets. The company expanded its San Jose campus in September 2021 with a manufacturing facility for advanced storage and server equipment. Supermicro was reported to have 2,400 people working in San Jose. In November 2021, the joint venture of Super Micro Computer and Fiberhome Telecommunication Technologies won a contract for supplying servers to Xinjiang Bingtuan for 'public safety purposes', which is associated with the suppression of

Uyghurs The Uyghurs; ; ; ; zh, s=, t=, p=Wéiwú'ěr, IPA: ( ), alternatively spelled Uighurs, Uygurs or Uigurs, are a Turkic ethnic group originating from and culturally affiliated with the general region of Central and East Asia. The Uyghur ...

ethnic group and construction of a surveillance system in the province of

Xinjiang Xinjiang, SASM/GNC: ''Xinjang''; zh, c=, p=Xīnjiāng; formerly romanized as Sinkiang (, ), officially the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR), is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China (PRC), located in the northwest ...

. On December 21, 2021, the ''

Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large na ...

'' together with Russian dissident authors

Andrei Soldatov Andrei Alekseyevich Soldatov (russian: Андрей Алексеевич Солдатов, born 4 October 1975 in Moscow, Russia) is a Russian investigative journalist and Russian security services expert. Together with fellow journalist Irina B ...

and

Irina Borogan Irina Petrovna Borogan (russian: Ирина Петровна Бороган), born September 9, 1974 in Moscow, Russia, is a Russian investigative journalist. Journalism Irina Borogan started her journalistic career in 1996 as correspondent of Se ...

, accused the company of supplying 30 servers to the Moscow control center for

Internet censorship in Russia Internet censorship in the Russian Federation is enforced on the basis of several laws and through several mechanisms. Since 2012, Russia maintains a centralized internet blacklist (known as the "single register") maintained by the Federal Service ...

References

External links