Kingston Technology
More info
- Creator
- John Tu, David Sun
- Released
- Type
- Memory and storage manufacturer
- Website
- kingston.com
The world's largest independent maker of memory modules, started in 1987 around a single SIMM and still owned by its two founders.
John Tu and David Sun started the company in Fountain Valley, California, in October 1987, in the middle of a shortage of surface-mount memory chips, with a SIMM of their own design built on the older chips that could still be had. The business model has not changed since: Kingston makes no DRAM chips itself but buys them from Samsung, Micron and SK hynix, tests them, mounts them on modules and sells under its own name to PC builders and corporate buyers. USB flash drives (DataTraveler), SSDs and the encrypted IronKey sticks came later.
The founders sold 80 per cent to SoftBank in 1996 for 1.5 billion dollars and handed out 100 million of it as staff bonuses; three years later they bought the company back for 450 million. The HyperX gaming brand, launched in 2002, was sold to HP in 2021, though Kingston kept the memory side and renamed it Kingston FURY.