Asus won Intel's trust by fixing a motherboard problem Intel couldn't
In its earliest days, Asus designed a motherboard for Intel's 486 chip without ever holding the processor. When the Taiwanese start-up asked Intel for a sample, Intel was struggling with its own board. Asus solved the problem, its design worked first time, and it has received early engineering samples ever since.
Four hardware engineers who had worked at Acer, M.T. Liao, Wayne Hsieh, Ted Hsu and Tzu-Hsien Tung, founded the company in Taipei in 1989. Back then Taiwan was no leader in computer hardware, and local firms typically waited about six months after IBM got new Intel prototypes. The name comes from Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek myth, trimmed to its last four letters so it would sit high in alphabetical lists. In Chinese it is Huáshuò, meaning eminence.
Motherboards built its reputation, but the company kept branching out. It released the first PhysX physics accelerator card in 2005, co-developed laptops with Lamborghini and helped make Microsoft's first Origami handheld computers. Its biggest hit came in June 2007, when it unveiled the Eee PC at Computex. That small, cheap netbook collected gadget-of-the-year honours from several magazines, until shoppers drifted to tablets and ultrabooks and production stopped in January 2013.
In January 2008 Asus split itself in three, keeping its own branded products while spinning off Pegatron for contract manufacturing and Unihan for cases and moulding; a pension overhaul during that split drew heavy criticism. It later built Google's Nexus 7 tablets, launched ZenFone handsets at CES in 2014, and aimed at gamers with the ROG Phone in 2018. In January 2026, though, it announced it would leave the smartphone business that same year.
Personal computers remain the core. As of 2024 Asus ranked as the world's fifth largest PC vendor by units, and in July 2026 it offered a free beta of an assistant that splits tasks between local and cloud processing.
Source: Asus
