For Wistron chair Simon Lin, one of the biggest growth stories in global technology comes down to being in the right place at the right time — and making the right bet.

Eight years ago, the Taipei-based electronics manufacturer aligned itself with Nvidia. As Nvidia’s fortunes have surged in the AI era, so have those of the much less familiar company that began as a spinoff of laptop maker Acer and now builds the servers that house Nvidia’s chips.

Wistron reported revenue of $70.2 billion in 2025, more than double the prior year. Servers accounted for 70% of total sales. In the first half of 2026, revenue had already reached $55 billion. Wistron is No. 198 on this year’s Fortune Global 500, up 298 places from a year earlier, the largest jump on this year’s ranking.

Wistron’s rise shows how the AI wave is reaching beyond trillion-dollar chipmakers and large language model developers to lift the companies manufacturing the hardware behind the technology. It is also a corporate comeback story: Wistron partnered with Nvidia at one of the lowest points in its history, then rode the AI boom into a new phase of growth.

“Even during dark times, you need to make yourself ready for any change in the future,” Lin says.

Lin, 72, has spent decades in the computer industry. He joined Acer in 1979, a few years after the company was founded. Acer cofounder Stan Shih credits Lin with coining the “smiling curve” economic model, which holds that the lowest margins are found in the middle of the supply chain — namely, assembly and manufacturing — while higher margins sit at either end, in design and final retail.

In 2001, Shih spun off Acer’s manufacturing division into a separate company, Wistron, and named Lin chair and CEO. Since then, Wistron has tried to escape the bottom of the smiling curve by moving beyond computer assembly and toward building complete AI systems. Lin stepped down as CEO in 2022.

At first, Wistron made PCs for other brands, a commoditized, low-margin business. A turning point came in 2007, when Apple unveiled the iPhone. Wistron was “stuck in the middle,” Lin recalled in July from Wistron’s office in a leafy suburb north of Taipei. “The PC business was no longer as strong, and smartphones were not our main focus.”

Wistron did briefly enter smartphones. It opened one of India’s first iPhone factories in 2017. But by 2023, it had exited the business amid low margins and after labor unrest at its plant in Karnataka, India.

That exit, in hindsight, cleared the way for a more valuable shift, and it left Wistron more focused when demand began moving toward the kind of infrastructure that AI requires.

Nvidia has been a Wistron customer for nearly a decade. At first, Wistron helped manufacture Nvidia’s graphics cards, the processors used in computer games, a business that offered better margins than ordinary PCs.

Then, in late 2022, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT. Demand for Nvidia’s processors, which are well suited to training large language models, surged. Nvidia turned to longtime partners such as Wistron to build increasingly powerful AI servers that stack multiple processors in giant, refrigerator-size racks.

Lin had to secure new factory space, recruit new talent, and manage new supply chains. “These aren’t strategic decisions but rather very practical challenges, day and night,” he says.

As soon as Wistron opened a state-of-the-art 287,000-square-foot server plant in Zhubei, in northwestern Taiwan, Nvidia booked its full capacity through 2026. Wistron then leased a nearby textile factory and quickly converted it to produce more AI servers.

The pace of change has even unsettled Lin. “In the past, one server generation typically lasted about two and a half to three years. You’d spend roughly a year designing a product, then it would stay in the market for about two years,” he says. “With AI, not only are there new products every year, but each generation is a revolutionary leap.”

Outside Taiwan and mainland China, Wistron operates facilities in Vietnam, Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines, and the Czech Republic. Its most important new bets may be two complexes near Fort Worth, Texas, covering 1.09 million square feet and dedicated to assembling Nvidia AI supercomputers.

Wistron had been considering a move to the U.S. for years, but it made the $761 million investment official last August as President Donald Trump threatened a 32% tariff on imports from Taiwan.

Trump has repeatedly accused Taiwan of “stealing” from the U.S. chip industry, but Lin says the U.S. deficit in chip infrastructure is the result of its own choices. “They threw it away,” he says. “Not stealing, okay?”

Wistron started from scratch in Texas. “All the equipment we needed had to be shipped from Southeast Asia, because we couldn’t buy it in the U.S.,” Lin says. Wistron also trained workers “from scratch,” he says. “It simply requires more time, but the foundation is good.”

Avoiding Trump’s tariffs helped drive Wistron’s decision to build the Texas factories, which are expected to create more than 800 jobs. But a U.S. manufacturing base also has practical advantages. AI servers are heavy, sometimes weighing as much as six tons, making them difficult to move by air or sea.

“Even if this decision was slightly forced by tariffs, it became a reasonable one later on,” Lin says.

Lin described himself as a “somewhat lazy CEO” in a 2024 address to graduates, though he now grimaces at the phrase. What he meant, he says, is that he prefers to focus on a few priorities rather than spread himself too thin.

He would rather see himself as a useful counterweight to groupthink. “When the company is doing well, I act as a devil’s advocate. I try to remind the management team where we could be wrong,” he says. “When people feel discouraged or the company is going through a difficult time, I take on the role of a cheerleader. I always say, ‘Tomorrow will be better.’”

For an executive whose company’s rapid growth has been powered by AI, Lin says he does not rely on the technology heavily himself. He mainly uses it for research.

“I’m not sure whether it’s so intelligent [that] it can replace me to make a decision,” he says.

This article appears in the August/September 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “Simon Lin’s early bet made Wistron an unsung winner of the AI boom.” This story was originally featured on Fortune.com