It’s a situation that would seem nonsensical on the surface, but AMD’s James Knight and Supermicro’s Ken Kajikawa say the unique customer engagements reflect the highly collaborative nature of their partnership and how they differ from competitors.

AMD and Supermicro are large tech companies, but senior leaders at both firms said they have the capacity to act like much smaller entities when it comes to solving unique computer problems for customers.

In a recent interview with CRN and at a panel at the SIGGRAPH 2024 conference in Denver late July, AMD Global Media and Entertainment Director James Knight said his company—Intel’s rival in the x86 CPU market—and server vendor Supermicro have demonstrated this multiple times when working with content creation and computer graphics studios.

[Related: Forrest Norrod On How AMD Is Fighting Nvidia With ‘Significant’ AI Investments]

“We’ve led with listening to the studios and the creatives first and working towards solving those problems and worrying about sales quotas and marketing exploits second,” he said.

For example, Knight (pictured in above photo on the left) cited two customers—a major studio and a smaller one—who wanted to receive systems without CPUs inside.

It’s a situation that would seem nonsensical on the surface, but Knight, a visual effects veteran who has worked on movies ranging from “Avatar” to “The Amazing Spider-Man,” said the two studios made the request to AMD because they were working with fixed budgets and wanted time to determine which CPUs would work best.

“They didn’t know which chip was going to work the best, so they asked me, ‘Do you think one of your OEMs would be willing to iterate with us [and] effectively sell us a system without CPUs? And then you could send the CPUs to us, and we can figure out which solution is best,” he said.

Knight said not all companies would have considered such a request.

“If I’d have approached, let’s say, other companies with that, they may have said, ‘No, sorry, we need to know the size of the business opportunity,’” he said.

That wasn’t the case with Supermicro, a company whose revenue grew 110 percent to $14.9 billion for its recently completed 2024 fiscal year due to high demand for AI solutions.

“Supermicro didn’t lead with that. They lead with, ‘Absolutely, yeah, we’d love to collaborate and help solve that problem,’” Knight said.

To the nine-year AMD veteran, “that’s not something that you would necessarily think that a company the size of Supermicro would do.” But while the transactions weren’t straightforward, they ultimately led to more business for both AMD and Supermicro.

“That’s not capitalistic. That’s not salesy. And that’s exactly, ironically, what has [led] to more sales: being collaborative,” he said.

Ken Kajikawa (pictured in above photo on the right), senior director of business development at Supermicro, said this spirit of collaboration has helped other customers with bespoke computing needs.

For instance, he cited a studio that was the first to receive a liquid-cooled workstation tower powered by AMD’s latest Ryzen Threadripper CPU. The engagement between Supermicro, AMD and the customer eventually evolved into a conversation about a custom AMD-based rackmount workstation solution.

“We sat in a room with that team for two hours,” said Kajikawa, who added that the conversation revolved around the best technologies AMD and Supermicro had to offer.

To Kajikawa, it doesn’t matter if the customer is a large studio with massive purchasing power or a small firm with relatively fewer needs. What differentiates the Supermicro and AMD partnership are the two companies’ ability to provide solutions that are proportional to whatever level of compute a customer requires, according to the director.

“At Supermicro, we have the box and, we’re like, ‘Hey, man, you want a turbocharger or supercharger. We don’t care. We’ll build it for you.’ That’s the beauty of Supermicro,” he said.

An account executive at a Westport, Conn.-based solution provider that partners with both Supermicro and AMD told CRN that he has seen that spirit of “open collaboration” in action through his own work with the two companies.

“They talk about being able to solve any kind of problem that a customer has and being able to try to fulfill any use case, whether it be from a power and cooling or a compute perspective or a rack footprint perspective,” said John Lynch of Eastern Computer Exchange. “They’re going to test out and validate every option that they can and do that in collaboration with the partner and with the provider, like AMD.”

“Their competitors don’t really have that same mindset,” he added.