Nvidia Corp’s partner Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT, 雲達科技) expects to double sales of its artificial intelligence (AI) servers next year and for long-term demand to persist as businesses weave AI into their operations and services.
QCT president Mike Yang (楊麒令) said in a Bloomberg Television interview that the AI boom “actually is going to maintain and you’ll see its growth keeping stronger and stronger for the upcoming years.” QCT is the owned subsidiary of Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦).
Quanta Computer, which works with Nvidia to build AI servers, has benefited greatly from Wall Street’s bet on the technology being the next big thing. Like its Santa Clara, California-based chipmaking partner, Quanta’s share price has more than doubled this year.
Photo: Fang Wei-chieh, Taipei Times
Component providers are working together to boost production capacity and help alleviate an ongoing shortage of Nvidia’s cutting-edge AI chips, Yang said, without committing to fulfilling all demand from customers by next year. Nvidia executives told analysts last month they were confident of expanding supply to meet heightened demand.
“We have a very much limited supply, but next year I think Nvidia will solve everything,” Yang said.
QCT generates billions of dollars in revenue annually, with AI servers accounting for 65 percent of its total sales, Yang said. He differentiates AI servers as those that include graphics processors, such as models made by Nvidia, versus traditional processor-driven hardware where Intel Corp still has a dominant share.
Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud, Amazon.com Inc’s AWS and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) are among QCT’s biggest customers. The company competes with the likes of Shanghai-listed Foxconn Industrial Internet Co (工業互聯) and Taiwanese peer Wiwynn Corp (緯穎科技) to provide servers for cloud service providers, mainly in the US and China.
Global shipments of AI servers are expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 29 percent between last year and 2026, according to Taipei-based research firm TrendForce Corp (集邦科技). Estimates from analysts and researchers have been overly conservative this year, as Nvidia has in successive quarters shocked the market with blowout sales forecasts.
Yang enjoyed a moment in the spotlight in late May when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) visited QCT’s booth at the Computex trade show in Taipei. Huang offered his signature leather jacket for Yang to wear during their joint marketing event. Yang said that the two companies first started working together to develop server products in 2015.
Like many other manufacturers, Yang is keeping a wary eye on the US-China trade conflict. The executive said QCT is looking to grow its production lines in the US, Germany and Thailand, while maintaining existing capacity in China, though he also said firms cannot afford to dismiss China as a major market.
“I still believe China is the biggest market,” Yang said. “I do believe people will still focus on both. China and the rest of the world.”
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