SMCI Adds Scores of Jobs Quickly as AI Hardware Demand Soars

As the world prepares itself to be remade in the image of generative AI, the companies powering the tech have swiftly risen to Master of the Universe status. This week, Nvidia overtook Apple and Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company. That’s an extraordinary development—and a little ominously reminiscent of the manic tailwinds of the .com bubble.

Whether gen AI startups do bring forth the next industrial revolution won’t become clear as quickly as these staccato market tempos suggest. Current sales significantly lag present enthusiasm for the tech’s potential. But the companies giving AI pioneers room to spread their wings (and train their models) are getting very rich in the meantime.

Take SMCI, Super Micro Computer Inc., as one example. These guys build the servers that store Nvidia’s GPU chips that train the AI models that will, theoretically, solve every problem in the human universe sooner or later…as long as the electricity doesn’t run out. Sharing a table with other players in the Data Center glow-up, SMCI’s stock is up over 200% from the top of the year. That’s likely to get a renewed bump when markets open Friday after Elon Musk announced on Thursday his xAI will leverage SMCI servers.

To see how company growth on the ground compares with market bravado, we investigated active jobs at SMCI with LinkUp Compass. Monthly active jobs are up over 100% from the top of the year as the company prepares itself to take on the flood of AI demand.

The Daily Active Listings tool gives users a maximally granular view of hiring day-to-day.

Another interesting factor of labor demand that our data provides is Closed Duration, measured in the Compass chart below.

Because LinkUp tracks the date when an open job is created and removed, we’re able to discern the time-to-hire on any given job. Now, not every job opening that’s removed from an employer website ends in a hire, but enough do to capture clear trends in aggregate. The resulting metric, called Closed Duration, measures the average number of days a job was open at a company and can be used as a proxy for hiring velocity. The lower the Closed Duration, the more quickly a company is hiring.

In the case of SMCI, Closed Duration is down from the start of the year. With demand and stock price shooting up together, the firm’s bid for employees looks particularly strong in a tight labor market.

Keep ahead of the company curve and signals of legitimate growth with LinkUp Compass: it’s the job market, now in living color. And stay tuned for more of our Notes from The Evidence Lab, where we showcase the engaging interface and unmatched granularity of our job market dataset.

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