Supermicro

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 headquarters in North San Jose, California 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 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 185,000-square-foot to 312,000 square feet . Until recently, a bronze sculpture, Chandelier by John Jagger, hung from the ceiling of an elliptical loggia 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 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 newly-constructed manufacturing facility in San Jose was designed to meet LEED gold certification.On October 4, 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek 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 backdoors to its servers. The report claimed that the compromised servers had been sold to U.S. government divisions 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 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, U.S intelligence 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 ethnic group and construction of a surveillance system in the province of Xinjiang.On December 21, 2021, the Washington Post together with Russian dissident authors Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, accused the company of supplying 30 servers to the Moscow control center for Internet censorship in Russia.