While the world watches the chip race, the true triumph of the AI era is unfolding where it was least expected—in workshops producing furniture hardware. 85-year-old Lin Tsung-chi, founder of King Slide Works, has officially become Taiwan's richest person. And it's not about cabinet hinges, but the hidden infrastructure of artificial intelligence.
Since the start of the year, King Slide's shares have soared nearly 280%. The company, which made drawer slides for decades, now controls about 80% of the global market for rail mechanisms for server racks. These inconspicuous parts hold multi-ton computing equipment and allow engineers to slide it out for maintenance without disrupting the delicate cooling system.
Margins Chipmakers Dream Of
King Slide's financial metrics look surreal for a manufacturer of "hardware." The company's gross margin reached 87% in the latest quarter. For comparison: Nvidia's is around 75%, and TSMC's is 68%. The secret is simple: when an AI server rack costs millions of dollars, the client doesn't haggle over the price of slides. They only care about reliability.
King Slide's Executive Vice President, JC Wang, attributes this profitability to two decades of engineering development that allowed the company to create specialized mechanisms perfectly tailored to specific server architectures.
Lin's fortune, according to Forbes, has reached $20.3 billion, allowing him to surpass Foxconn founder Terry Gou. And this is just the beginning.
New Architecture — New Slides
Analysts expect demand to only grow. Hyperscalers are massively transitioning to their own AI accelerators, increasing equipment density, and adopting liquid cooling. Each new chip differs in dimensions and heat output, thus requiring a unique rack and unique slides.
Recent moves by giants are telling: Google received an option to purchase up to 58.97 million shares of Marvell Technology under an expanded AI processor agreement, and Alibaba is raising $10.2 billion to develop its own AI stack—from infrastructure to models. Each such accelerator is a new order for King Slide.
The pace of data center construction is impressive: the declared capacity of gas power plants for direct power supply to data centers in the US has grown from 97 GW at the end of 2025 to more than 189 GW by mid-2026. Nvidia, in turn, is scaling its Vera Rubin platform to gigawatt-level capacities.
However, competition is intensifying. According to Daiwa Securities, King Slide's share of supplies for Nvidia system kits could drop to 75% next year, as the chipmaker diversifies its suppliers. This will allow data center operators to negotiate prices. But even in this scenario, the company will maintain a direct dependence on AI infrastructure investments.
Notably, Taiwanese authorities have already announced the payment of "AI dividends" to citizens—10,000 TWD (~$314) per person. The island's economy is increasingly embedded in the neural network ecosystem, and King Slide is a striking example of how "secondary" players in the AI chain become its most profitable beneficiaries.
My view: King Slide's story is a classic example of how, in technological revolutions, not only the creators of the "brains" win, but also those who provide the "skeleton." Investors ignoring high-margin infrastructure "invisibles" risk missing some of the most interesting growth stories of this decade.