China couple rakes in nearly $12 billion as AI circuit board shares soar 530%

HONG KONG – When Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang hosted a private banquet for suppliers in Taiwan in May, the room was packed with some of the biggest names in global electronics. The chairmen of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Hon Hai Precision Industry were there, surrounded by a sea of local manufacturing titans.

In a group photo taken to mark the event stood a man tucked in the back row, wearing a dark shirt, whom few would recognise: Mr Chen Tao.

That unassuming presence belies his growing influence. The 53-year-old former soldier, who once served in China’s Taklamakan Desert, has become one of the country’s richest artificial intelligence (AI) billionaires – his fortune built on the world’s insatiable demand for the technology and on a critical partnership with Nvidia.

Mr Chen is the founder and chairman of Victory Giant Technology Huizhou, which manufactures printed circuit boards (PCBs) – the intricate electronic backbone for the AI servers.

As Nvidia’s graphics processing units have become the engines of the AI revolution, Victory Giant – which is based in the city of Huizhou in China’s Guangdong province, north of Hong Kong – has emerged as one of its core suppliers.

The demand has sent Victory Giant's stock soaring, making it 2025’s top performer on the MSCI Asia Pacific Index, with gains of more than 530 per cent. While its valuation is 32 times estimated earnings, that is only a fraction of the 100-plus multiples seen by other local chipmakers. 

The surge gives Mr Chen and his wife, Ms Liu Chunlan, a combined net worth of US$9.1 billion (S$11.8 billion) as of the Nov 25 close, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, vaulting them above the likes of Pershing Square Capital Management founder Bill Ackman and Blackstone President Jon Gray.

The couple’s fortune is derived from the 27 per cent stake they hold in the company.

Nvidia wave

Born in 1972, Mr Chen left the army in 1991 to become a civil servant. But a field trip to Shenzhen, the epicentre of China’s economic reforms, changed his trajectory. He quit his “iron rice bowl” – a Chinese saying meaning a job for life – and moved to Guangdong province.

In 1996, he became a salesman at a Taiwanese-owned PCB factory. Realising the immense demand for the circuit boards, he founded Victory Giant Technology in 2003 – initially called Shenghua Electronics – and took it public in Shenzhen in 2015.

His wife, a Chinese national with Australian long-term residency, serves as a company director, according to the company’s 2024 annual report. 

For years, Victory Giant was one of the lesser-known names that benefited “quietly but meaningfully from this buildout”, according to Mr John Lin, chief investment officer at AllianceBernstein’s emerging markets value equities and China equities.

Then in 2019, long before the AI boom, Mr Chen established the company’s high-density interconnect (HDI) division. It was a bet on the complex, high-end boards needed for gaming graphics cards.

That bet paid off. By 2024, Victory Giant was supplying Nvidia’s H-series AI accelerator cards and has since risen to become a core Nvidia supplier, according to local media. 

The company’s relationship with Nvidia has been a vital asset. Mr Sumeet Singh of Aequitas Research estimates that the 60 per cent of the company’s overseas sales are probably from Nvidia, given Victory Giant’s high-end expertise.

Geopolitical tightrope

Still, if geopolitical tensions escalate or Victory Giant’s capacity underperforms, big clients like Nvidia may shift to rival suppliers.

They include Taiwan’s Unimicron Technology and Zhen Ding Technology Holding, said Ms Victoria Mio, head of Greater China equities at Janus Henderson Investors in Singapore. Over-reliance on Nvidia and China-based production increases earnings volatility and regulatory risk, she added.

“Out-of-China capacity is essential,” said Ms Mio. “US-China tensions, export controls, and US tech giants’ supplier diversification mandates are real.”

If there are further increases in trade restrictions, Victory Giant may face additional risks such as supply chain constraints, reduced access to key markets, strained customer relationships and loss of market opportunities, it said in a filing to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Mr Chen is pursuing a vision to go global. Victory Giant currently covers major markets including China, the US, Japan, Europe and South Korea, serving over 350 international clients. This demand has created a new, urgent problem: capacity.

In response, the company launched an aggressive “capacity overseas” strategy. It announced a US$250 million capital increase for its Thai base in July, following the opening of a new facility in Vietnam in March, targeting high-end HDI boards.

The company is hoping to use its Thailand and Vietnam plants to serve export-sensitive Western customers and mitigate China-related risk, according to Ms Mio.

To lead this global push, Mr Chen reshuffled his executive team. In August 2024, he stepped down as president, handing the reins to 48-year-old Mr Zhao Qixiang. Mr Zhao holds a Hong Kong identity card that echoes the globalisation demand, the company said in a filing. 

The company also brought in a 66-year-old New Zealand technology expert, Mr Victor Taveras, as chief technology officer in August 2024, specifically for his factory-building experience and technical expertise across the US, Malaysia, China and Vietnam.

Victory Giant faces competition from rivals in the US, Japan’s Ibiden and Taiwan’s Unimicron. These companies are also aggressively expanding production capacity in South-east Asia to compete. 

But for now, Victory Giant is still enjoying growing profitability: A filing shows the company’s gross margin on its HDI boards was 38.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2025, up from just 8.3 per cent the year before. BLOOMBERG