[HONG KONG] When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang hosted a private banquet for suppliers in Taiwan in May, the venue was packed with some of the biggest names in the global electronics industry. The chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Hon Hai Precision Industries were there, surrounded by a crowd of local manufacturing giants.
In the group photo commemorating the event, there was a man in a dark shirt hiding in the back row, but few would recognize him as Chen Tao.
His modest presence belies his growing influence. The 53-year-old military veteran who once served in China’s Taklamakan Desert is now one of the country’s richest artificial intelligence (AI) billionaires, with his fortune built on the world’s insatiable demand for technology and a key partnership with Nvidia.
Mr. Chen is the founder and chairman of Victory Giant Technology Huizhou, which manufactures printed circuit boards (PCBs), the complex electronic backbone of AI servers. As Nvidia’s GPUs power the AI revolution, Victory Giant, based in Huizhou, China’s Guangdong province north of Hong Kong, has emerged as one of its core suppliers.
Victory Giant’s share price soared on demand, rising more than 530%, making it the top performer on the MSCI Asia-Pacific index this year. The company is valued at 32 times estimated earnings, a fraction of the more than 100 times other local semiconductor makers.
The surge brings Mr. Chen and his wife, Liu Chunlan, to a combined net worth of $9.1 billion as of Nov. 25’s close, far exceeding the likes of Pershing Square Capital Management founder Bill Ackman and Blackstone president John Gray, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The couple’s wealth comes from the 27 percent stake they own in the company.
Mr. Chen and his company did not respond to requests for comment.
nvidia wave
Born in 1972, Chen left the military in 1991 to join the civil service. But a trip to Shenzhen, the center of China’s economic reform, changed his trajectory. He quit his life’s work, the Chinese proverb “iron bowl,” and moved to Guangdong province.
In 1996, I became a sales representative for a Taiwanese-owned PCB factory. Recognizing the huge demand for circuit boards, he founded Shenghua Technology (originally known as Shenghua Electronics) in 2003 and went public in Shenzhen in 2015. According to the company’s 2024 annual report, his wife, a Chinese long-term resident of Australia, is a director.
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Over the years, Victory Giant has been one of the lesser-known stocks that has benefited “quietly but meaningfully from this buildup,” said John Lin, chief investment officer for emerging market value and China stocks at AllianceBernstein.
And in 2019, long before the AI boom, Chen founded the company’s high-density interconnect (HDI) division. It was a gamble on the complex high-end boards needed for gaming graphics cards. The gamble paid off. According to local media, Victory Giant will supply Nvidia’s H-series AI accelerator cards by 2024 and has since grown to become Nvidia’s core supplier.
The company’s relationship with Nvidia is a vital asset. Aequitas Research’s Sumeet Singh estimates that given Victory’s high-end expertise, 60% of the company’s international sales likely come from Nvidia.
geopolitical tightrope
Still, large customers such as Nvidia could move to other competing suppliers if geopolitical tensions escalate or Victory Giant’s production capacity declines.
These include Taiwan’s Unimicron Technology and Zhen Ding Technology Holding, said Victoria Mio, head of Greater China equities at Janus Henderson in Singapore. Over-reliance on Nvidia and China-based production increases revenue volatility and regulatory risk, he said.
“Manufacturing capacity outside of China is essential,” she says. “The U.S.-China conflict, export restrictions, and the imperative for U.S. tech giants to diversify their suppliers are real.”
If trade restrictions are further tightened, Victory Giant could face further risks, including supply chain restrictions, reduced access to key markets, strained customer relationships and lost market opportunities, it said in a filing to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Chen pursues a vision of going global. Victory Giant currently serves more than 350 international customers, covering major markets including mainland China, the United States, Japan, Europe, and South Korea. This demand has created a new and urgent problem: capacity.
In response, the company launched an aggressive “overseas production” strategy. In July, the company announced a US$250 million capital increase in its Thailand base. This was followed by a new location in Vietnam in March 2025 targeting high-end HDI boards.
Myo said the company hopes to use its factories in Thailand and Vietnam to serve export-sensitive Western customers and reduce China risks.
To lead this global push, Mr. Chen reorganized the management team. In August last year, he resigned as president and handed his successor to 48-year-old Zhao Qixiang. Mr. Zhao, who rose from secretary to chairman, has a Hong Kong ID card that reflects the demands of globalization, the company said in a filing.
The company also hired 66-year-old New Zealand technology expert Victor J. Taveras as chief technology officer in August 2024, recognizing his experience and technical expertise in building factories across the United States, Malaysia, China and Vietnam, among others.
Victory Giant faces competition from U.S. rivals, Japan’s IBIDEN and Taiwan’s Unimicron. These companies are also aggressively expanding their production capacity in Southeast Asia to compete.
But for now, Victory Giant is still enjoying improved profitability. The company’s HDI board gross margin was 38.8% in the first quarter of 2025, up from just 8.3% in the same period last year, according to the filing. bloomberg
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