5 days ago
Vik Malyala Talks AI, Efficiency, and Sustainability
Home » Interview Of The Week » Vik Malyala Talks AI, Efficiency, and Sustainability
We caught up with Vik Malyala, President and Managing Director of Supermicro for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region, during COMPUTEX 2025 to discuss the evolving technology landscape, Supermicro's competitive edge, and the company's strong commitment to sustainability in data centers.
TECHx Media: Supermicro has been a regular exhibitor at Computex over the years. What's different this time around?
Vik Malyala: This year, the biggest theme we see across every booth and every corner of the show is AI-first. While the industry has traditionally showcased a broad mix of solutions, the profile of customers and applications is clearly shifting. There's a major focus on AI, whether it's training or inferencing workloads.
Even outside enterprise AI, there's a buzz around gaming and workstation improvements that enhance user experiences. What's encouraging is the quality of conversations, people are genuinely engaged, eager to understand the technology deeply. It feels like no one wants to miss out on the opportunities AI is creating.
Computex continues to be an excellent platform for us to connect with customers, understand their needs, and showcase how Supermicro fits into their AI journeys.
TECHx Media: What would you say is Supermicro's competitive advantage over other global players?
Vik Malyala: One key differentiator is our time to market, and that's not as simple as it sounds. What really enables us is our fully vertically integrated approach. We design, develop, manufacture, integrate, test, and support everything under one roof. We call this the 'building block' approach.
This approach allows us to keep pace with rapid technology transitions and bring fully vetted platforms and solutions to customers faster than others.
The second big focus is energy efficiency. Data centers and customers are often constrained by power availability, so optimizing deployments within a power budget is critical. For over 16 years, Supermicro has prioritized energy-efficient designs, helping customers adopt green technology at scale. If you don't embrace energy efficiency, you risk falling behind.
In summary: rapid development, energy-efficient customization, and application-optimized solutions are the pillars of our differentiation.
TECHx Media: AI is a huge reality right now. How has Supermicro integrated AI into its product portfolio, and what real-world impacts are you seeing?
Vik Malyala: That's a complex but fascinating question. To improve human experience through AI, huge computational power is needed, especially for developing massive large language models, some with over a trillion parameters, and growing.
A handful of companies develop these models, and efficiency is critical. We look closely at power usage effectiveness (PUE), and one way to improve PUE is liquid cooling, which is far more efficient at removing heat than traditional air cooling.
Supermicro has pioneered large-scale liquid-cooled compute infrastructure. Just recently, we announced the Supermicro DLC2 system, which can remove up to 98% of heat using liquid cooling. This drastically improves data center efficiency, lowers power consumption, and supports sustainability goals.
On the inferencing side, the real-time application of AI models, we offer over 20 different solutions integrating accelerators from Nvidia, Intel, AMD, and others. These come in various form factors to meet the diverse needs of data center cores and edge deployments. Our goal is to deliver the right-sized, optimized solution for each customer, always aligned with energy efficiency and performance.
TECHx Media: Sustainability and green computing seem integral to Supermicro's strategy. How important is this focus?
Vik Malyala: Sustainability is core to everything we do. Data centers today consume 2-3% of global power, and with ever-growing data center sizes, moving from tens of megawatts to gigawatts, power consumption is skyrocketing.
Through our data center building block solutions (DCBS), we optimize every element of data center design and operation. This holistic approach ensures we manage sustainability in a meaningful, measurable way.
It's not just a buzzword for us, it's embedded deeply in our culture and operations. Given the scale of deployment we're seeing now, our commitment to green technology is more visible and more critical than ever.
Watch full video interview on TECHx TV.
