Super Micro Shares Plunge 25% After Co-Founder Charged in $2.5B Smuggling Plot
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2026/03/20/super-micro-shares-plunge-25-after-co-founder-charged-in-25-billion-ai-chip-smuggling-plot/loading story #47457158
It's sad to see what's happened to SuperMicro. They were one of the few vendors of server-grade hardware fitting standard ATX, mATX, and ITX form factors. In my experience their hardware was always better than the others who attempted to do the same (Gigabyte, Asus, ASRock). These days, motherboards with the features I want are going to be on AliExpress. Ironic considering this latest news is about putting trade barriers between the US and mainland China.
Supermicro is definitely a "you get what you pay for". We bought thousands of servers from their vertical integrations partners, had massive board and backplane problems. Took a few years but they eventually took back over $30 million dollars worth of servers, which were scrapped ultimately because the rework on them was so cost prohibitive. We lost $30M on that even after the $30M in good will refunds.
Supermicro also has the lowest bios/efi/bmc/ipmi/redfish out of any vendor we have seen.
Just low tier cheap ass shit by a company who can barely survive quarter to quarter without running some new scam on customers, investors, and even governments.
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The timing is brutal - SMCI already had the accounting restatement scandal in 2024, spent months fighting delisting, finally got somewhat rehabilitated in the AI infrastructure boom... and now this. 25% single-day drop on a company that was already trading at a discount to peers tells you the market was still pricing in tail risk. For anyone tracking institutional holdings - the 13F filings from Q4 showed several funds adding back SMCI after the accounting mess cleared up. Those bets just got very painful.
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Oof. SuperMicro also had it's hardware supply chain compromised back in the 2010s [0][1][2][3]
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-supermicro/
[2] - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/chinese-suppl...
[3] - https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-severed-ties-w...
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