Electronics maker Wistron Corp (緯創) yesterday said it is shipping artificial intelligence (AI) server racks based on the newest Blackwell chip from Nvidia Corp this quarter, which would be a new growth engine to propel the company’s revenue contribution from AI-related devices and servers next year.
Wistron has been supplying AI-related products to Nvidia since 2017, and has now become a supplier of the AI server racks.
“We are seeing the rack business start to grow. We focus mostly on enterprise customers, while Wiwynn Corp (緯穎) concentrates on cloud service providers,” company president Jeff Lin (林建勳) told a virtual investors’ conference yesterday.
Photo: Reuters
Wiwynn is an AI server manufacturer and is 37 percent owned by Wistron. Wistron expects AI-related products and servers to account for more than 50 percent of the company’s revenue next year, compared with 40 percent this year, Lin said.
“The AI and server businesses have been growing. We are looking at quite good growth next year,” Lin said.
For Wistron alone, revenue from AI products — graphic processing unit (GPU)-based AI servers, GPU accelerator cards, AI modules and AI systems — would more than double from this year, Lin said.
AI products make up a double-digit percent of Wistron’s revenue so far this year on a non-consolidated basis, and the business is still growing each quarter, he added.
To cope with rising customer demand, Wistron is building a new AI server manufacturing facility in Hsinchu, which is to enter production in the first quarter of next year, Lin said.
A new production line in Mexico would also be ready for production of AI servers soon, he added.
Other than that, Wistron operates manufacturing sites in Vietnam, Malaysia and the Czech Republic, where it assembles PCs and industrial devices, the company said.
Non-China manufacturing sites rose to make up more than half of its total revenue, Wistron said.
The company is not ruling out the possibility of making AI servers in the US, despite intensifying trade frictions with China, company chairman Simon Lin (林憲銘) told investors.
“We are facing an ever-changing environment. The whole situation is perplexing. We have not seen any alleviation in geographical tensions,” Simon Lin said.
With strong resilience in operations, Wistron said it did not expect a significant impact from the incoming administration of US president-elect Donald Trump, Simon Lin said, citing the company’s global manufacturing footprint and operational agility.
Wistron said it is optimistic about its business and the whole year of 2024.
“We believe we will produce a quite good result this year. And we are confident about the growth next year,” Jeff Lin said.
Net profits surged 49.2 percent annually to NT$12.13 billion (US$372.17 million) during the first three quarters, compared with NT$8.13 billion, while earnings per share jumped to NT$4.26 from NT$2.9, the company’s financial statements showed.
Revenue grew 18.2 percent year-over-year from NT$636.52 billion to NT$752.07 billion during the January-to-September period, thanks to growth in AI-related products.
Operating profit margin improved from 2.65 percent to 3.6 percent.
Wistron said it expects operating profit margin to rise next year from this year.
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