Wistron chair Simon Lin has spent close to five decades in the computer industry, and he is now presiding over the company's biggest leap yet, a jump of 298 spots on this year's Fortune Global 500 to No. 198, the largest climb of any company on the list, according to Fortune.
Lin, 72, joined Acer in 1979 and is credited with coining the smiling curve, the idea that manufacturing sits at the lowest margin end of the technology supply chain while design and branding capture more value. Acer's founder spun the manufacturing arm off into Wistron in 2001 with Lin as chair and CEO, a post he held until stepping back from the CEO role in 2022.
Wistron's partnership with Nvidia dates back to around 2017, but it was the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 that turned steady demand into an explosion. As the manufacturer behind Nvidia's AI servers, Wistron has ridden that wave to $70.2 billion in revenue in 2025, more than double the prior year, and $55 billion in just the first half of 2026. Servers now make up 70 percent of total sales, up from a business that once looked nothing like today's AI infrastructure supplier.
To keep pace, Wistron has committed $761 million to two manufacturing complexes in Texas spanning 1.09 million square feet, built specifically to produce Nvidia AI supercomputers and creating more than 800 jobs. The Texas expansion addresses both tariff exposure and the logistics of a product that can weigh six tons per unit, a scale that makes shipping finished systems from overseas increasingly impractical.
Lin credited patience for positioning Wistron to capture the moment, saying that even during dark times a company needs to make itself ready for whatever change comes next. He described the pace of AI hardware cycles as a departure from the old rhythm of the server business, where a generation used to last two to three years. Each new generation now amounts to what he called a revolutionary leap, forcing manufacturers to move faster than the industry's traditional playbook ever required.