Rising Quanta Computer Makes Cofounder Barry Lam Taiwan’s Richest Person

This story is part of Forbes’ coverage of Taiwan’s Richest 2024. See the full list here.

AI-fueled growth drove Quanta Computer’s shares up to record highs in the past year, bumping chairman Barry Lam to the top of the list for the first time and securing a debut spot for vice chairman and president C.C. Leung.

Quanta maintained its position as the world’s largest contract manufacturer of laptops, shipping 47 million units in 2023—over a quarter of the global total. But its cloud computing business, started nearly two decades ago, has raced ahead to become the company’s biggest source of revenue, making up over 45% of sales last year.

Quanta is the world’s top supplier of servers to cloud service providers (by revenue), counting Meta and Google among its clients, and it’s ramping up production of the AI servers essential for heavy computational workloads. Server sales helped boost net profit by 37% to NT$40 billion ($1.2 billion) last year, even as revenue fell 15% to NT$1.1 trillion amid a worldwide dip in laptop demand.

Lam and Leung attended the same high school in Hong Kong and National Taiwan University, where Lam received a master’s degree in electrical engineering and Leung a bachelor’s in physics. After finishing school they set up an electronics company, then cofounded Quanta in 1988 in the northwestern city of Taoyuan. The Taiwan-listed firm has factories across the globe, including in mainland China, North America and Europe, with another in the pipeline in Vietnam that’s slated to come online this year.