PC vendor Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) yesterday said it is making better advances in expanding its server revenue over a five-year span to 2026, extending last quarter’s growth momentum.
Asustek fell behind its local peers in tapping into the server market, but its ambition to grow server revenue by five times within the 2022 to 2026 period looks more realistic after its strong performance in this year’s first quarter.
Server revenue increased several times last quarter from a year earlier to about NT$100 billion (US$3.1 billion), Asustek said.
Photo: Vanessa Cho, Taipei Times
“We are a latecomer to the server market, but we are making all-out efforts to achieve a better performance than we have announced,” Asustek chairman Jonney Shih (施崇棠) told reporters after the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting yesterday.
“There will be multiple times [of growth]. Besides, the timing is just ripe,” Shih said.
Asustek said it is confident that its server business would grow at a similar pace throughout this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers.
The company counts some of the world’s major cloud server providers as its server clients.
Asustek said about 70 percent to 80 percent of its server revenue came from AI servers.
To play catch-up, Asustek has created a server team, which comprises more than 600 engineers.
The company said it aims to expand the team without giving any specific numbers.
Asustek said its server team is can compete with the nation’s major original design manufacturing (ODM) companies in developing high-quality products.
The company said it can equip servers with Nvidia Corp’s latest Blackwell GPU architecture.
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), which makes AI servers powered by Nvidia’s AI chips, has the biggest server team among local ODM companies, with 2,200. Quanta aims to grow its server team by 10 percent this year to catch up with strong demand.
Asustek is also focusing on developing its AI robot ZenBo.
The company invested in AI robots a few years ago, but its development was “premature,” given inadequate computing power at the time, Shih said.
“There was no fundamental demand at the time, as it was not intelligent enough to interact with users,” Shih said. “Now, Asustek’s Zenbo can speak to users fluently and respond to their needs after being trained on big-language models”
“The timing is right,” he added.
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