Supermicro is reorienting some of its server business to pursue new opportunities for growth in the wireless market as 5G momentum builds.

“Our goal is to not just have servers, storage, and IoT, but 5G telco and provide them an open architecture using open x86 hardware,” CEO Charles Liang told SDxCentral in a phone interview. The company is also deepening collaboration efforts with software vendors and the open source community to assemble a more complete system for 5G, he said.

Most of the Silicon Valley-based server storage company’s business is generated in California today. Liang claims Supermicro has at least a 20% market share in California-based data centers for server storage, and now it wants to expand throughout the country, and into Europe and Asia.

“We have been growing very consistently. Recently we invested a lot in Taipei, Taiwan, and the goal is to enlarge our scale, increase our capacity, and also to lower our costs,” he said. The company expects to double its manufacturing in Taiwan during the next year, and a new manufacturing facility in Northern California will be up and running by early 2021, according to Liang. 

Those efforts are underway amid a backdrop of numerous factors, some political and others technical, that have fueled a heightened concern about the security of supply chains providing all the necessary components for global networks. 

A blockbuster report from Bloomberg two years ago claimed that Chinese operatives from a unit of the People’s Liberation Army inserted malicious chips into Supermicro servers during the manufacturing process without the company’s knowledge. The brazen attack eventually affected almost 30 companies, including a major bank, government contractors, Amazon, and Apple, according to anonymous sources cited by Bloomberg.

Supermicro, Amazon, and Apple strongly refuted the report, but the sting lingers as it underlines, at minimum, how fragile the security of network hardware can be if the manufacturing process, which typically involves multiple parties, isn’t carefully guarded.

The “Bloomberg news was 100% fake,” Liang said, adding that Supermicro has increased efforts to ensure the security of its procurement and supply chain management processes. 

“In the last two years we continue to validate and to call customers to investigate wherever we can, and we 100% believe it was fake news — no such thing there in reality. However, we understand security has been a very critical, very important topic to people around the world,” he said. 

“Today, most of our products are made in the USA or made in Taiwan, so in terms of supply chain — USA and Taiwan, I believe are some of the most safe locations to manufacture IT products,” Liang added. “At the same time, we continue to improve our firmware software, our logistic management systems, including implementing proprietary software, a proprietary approach to screen our products in the USA.”

Supermicro is screening its products to “double check, triple check” that security is ensured, according to Liang. “We feel very confident that our product is second-to-none in security concerns.”

The company, like all others, is also contending with the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, and it proudly claims it hasn’t suffered a single infection among employees working at its campuses globally. “COVID-19 continues to threaten us,” Liang said, adding that demand for Supermicro products has ebbed and flowed across its customer footprint.

The global pandemic has pushed the company to improve its operations across sales, manufacturing, and quality service controls to “make it more automatic, more software driven,” he said. “Yes, in the short term it’s a big pain but long term, indeed, it will improve our system, make our system [better] for design, for manufacturing, for customer service.”

The company, earlier this year, revealed an enclosed server designed for 5G radio access networks, artificial intelligence, and edge computing applications based on Intel Xeon x86 processors. And last month it announced a single unit network equipment building system with up to four Nvidia Tensor Core GPUs to address high-compute workloads and low latency requirements for mobile network operators.