Rising server demand to drive BMC sales, Aspeed says

Aspeed Technology Inc (信驊) expects significant revenue growth this year following a 40 percent drop last year, the world’s biggest supplier of baseboard management controllers (BMC) for servers said yesterday.

Recovering demand for generalpurpose servers and rising demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers based on Nvidia Corp’s new

Blackwell chips would be the major growth drivers, Aspeed said.

“We have been seeing a comeback in [BMC] orders for generalpurpose servers over the past two to three weeks,” Aspeed chairman Chris Lin (林鴻明) told an investors’ conference in Taipei.

Revenue growth would be driven mainly by the increase in BMCs per server rack, Lin said.

However, it would be a great challenge to see revenue rebound to the peak level in 2022, when customers built inventories for fear of supply disruptions, he said.

Aspeed’s revenue last year fell to NT$3.13 billion (US$98.1 million) from NT$5.21 billion in 2022 due to supply chain inventory adjustments, the company said.

New AI servers equipped with GB200 chips would be a boon to Aspeed’s sales, as the number of BMCs used would be almost double that of older-generation

H100 chips, Lin said.

Nvidia’s GB200 chips for AI servers are expected to hit the market in the fourth quarter, he said.

Aspeed yesterday raised its revenue forecast for this quarter to between NT$967 million and NT$1.03 billion, compared with NT$984 million last quarter, buoyed by demand for general-purpose servers, Lin said.

Revenue next quarter is projected to grow by a single-digit percentage to between NT$1.06 billion and US$1.13 billion, he said.

The company is to benefit from hyperscalers’ increased investment in data centers and servers, as major global data center operators’ capital spending is expected to rise 25 percent to US$198 billion this year, Aspeed said, citing projections by Bloomberg and Morgan Stanley.

Their spending on AI servers is forecast to soar about 92 percent to US$77 billion from US$40 billion last year, it said.

Gross margin this year would be little changed, ranging from 63 percent to 65 percent, compared with 64.14 percent last year, the company said.

Aspeed reported that net profit last year plunged about 52 percent to NT$1 billion from a year earlier. Earnings per share more than halved to NT$26.66 from NT$55.72.