F or the citizens of Carrollton–a small city in west Georgia covered in lush trees and flanked by the Little Tallapoosa River–the name Richards, or at least Southwire, is instantly recognizable. Many of its 28,000 residents work for the company, which has been headquartered here for more than half a century. Southwire’s founder Roy Richards (d. 1985) was deeply involved in his hometown, serving as chairman of the Carroll City-County Hospital Authority; chairman of Peoples Bank of Carrollton; a past president of the Carroll County Chamber of Commerce; and a former director of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce. The University of West Georgia’s Richards College of Business in town is named after him, thanks to a gift to the school by his son Roy Richards, Jr., who set up a family foundation in 1990 to continue supporting the city and surrounding areas.

Southwire is also known for its highly celebrated 12 for Life program, a nearly two-decade partnership between the company and local schools that combines traditional classroom instruction with jobs inside a modified manufacturing environment and has boosted graduation rates at the city’s high schools to over 90%, up from 64% when the program kicked off in 2007.

Outside of Carrollton, Southwire is hardly a household name but it manufactures half of the wire and cable used to distribute electricity in the U.S., and its electrical wiring is in roughly half of American homes, per the company. It employs more than 9,000 in at least 40 U.S. cities and in several other countries around the world. And thanks in part to rising copper prices, post-pandemic demand for electrical infrastructure and now data centers, Southwire’s revenue hit a record $9.7 billion in 2025, which Forbes estimates is up more than 50% since 2021. It’s also made a bundle for the Richards family, who still owns 100% of the business and is worth approximately $13.1 billion, Forbes estimates — enough to make them one of the richest families in America.

The family fortune will likely continue to grow due to the explosion of AI data centers. Already between 2021 and 2025, investment in them has quadrupled, according to the Federal Reserve Board, and another 1,500 new data centers are currently being developed in the U.S. These new AI data centers run on ultra-powerful GPU chips that require 2-4 times more watts of energy than traditional chips.

Good news for the Richards family, which tripled the size of one of its plants in North Carolina that produces heavy-duty cables necessary to scale AI data centers among other items in November 2024. Southwire has also poured $1.8 billion into modernizing its facilities to better position it for the boom. “[Southwire] is trying to stay on the cutting edge,” says David Long, CEO of the National Electrical Contractors Association.

By 2030, AI-driven data center energy demand is projected to rise by 175%. But power availability is already a top constraint for operators—even outranking GPU access, according to Southwire. All of which means utilities will need to reevaluate everything from how they deliver electricity to how they manage costs, with the need for infrastructure partners like Southwire more critical than ever.

W hile the Richards family and Southwire declined to speak for this story, they were interviewed by Forbes in 1967 and 1976, which provided much of the family and company background along with Southwire’s website. The family’s history dates back nearly 90 years to 1937. Wanting to outfit his grandmother’s house with electricity, 25-year-old Roy Richards returned to his home in Carroll County shortly after graduating from Georgia Tech and started building electric poles. “Industrialization was just getting started in the South,” he told Forbes in May 1967.

With help from a federal loan initiative to distribute electricity to remote areas of the country, his company, Richards & Associates, spent the next two and a half years stringing 3,500 miles of cable across rural America.

World War II paused the loan program and the business dissolved when Richards left to serve in the Army, eventually becoming a captain, according to Southwire’s website. By the time he returned to Georgia, the poles he’d built were useless, due to a post-war shortage of wires then on a four-year delay. "I felt that there had to be a better way than this," Richards told Forbes in 1967, "and got into the business myself."

The rapid, controversial development of data centers is a huge opportunity and even bigger test for the climate conscious Southwire.

So he started Southwire in 1950, making his own wire with second-hand machinery, $80,000 in capital and a team of 12 people including an old Georgia Tech professor. Within two years, it had shipped 5 million pounds of wire. “It helps not to know something can’t be done,” he told Forbes in 1976.

Richards’ next breakthrough was the 1963 invention of Southwire’s continuous rod system, which automated several manual steps in the process of casting raw copper and aluminum into the rods used to make wires. Southwire claims that its patented system, which saves money and brings in profits from royalties, is now responsible for manufacturing 50% of the world’s copper rods – the primary raw material used in copper wires, cables and conductors and considered one of the best conductors of electricity.

“Most businessmen view technology as a necessary evil," a Southwire competitor said in 1976, "but Roy uses it as an entrepreneurial tool."

The company chugged on over the next few years, but the business struggled to source enough aluminum necessary for wire production. So in 1968 Richards took out a record-breaking $142 million industrial revenue bond for an aluminum smelter that it set up as a joint venture with National Steel, a U.S. steel producer that eventually went bankrupt in 2003.

Richards spent the rest of his tenure at Southwire becoming close to what Forbes described in 1976 as a “one-man conglomerate.” After aluminum came, then a copper smelter, then a sawmill for shipping pallets and spools; Southwire even had its own gas and oil wells during the energy crisis in the 1970s.

After he died in 1985, his first born Roy Richards, Jr. took over as CEO. He and his six siblings grew up on a small farm in Carrollton right on the border where paved streets became dirt roads. The children spent their time fishing, paddling in creeks and squirrel hunting. He started college at his father’s alma mater Georgia Tech in 1981, but dropped out to get an early start in the family business.

Roy Richards Jr. inherited the reins just as cracks began to show. Record-high interest rates during the 1981-1982 recession particularly hurt manufacturing companies that had significant debt like Southwire. The vertical integration that it had once prided itself on–nearly all of its plants were funded by government debt–started to cause pain points when, at the same time, aluminum and copper prices collapsed.

“[Southwire] was clawing its way back from a near bankruptcy experience,” Richards, Jr. recalled in a video in 2022, “Super thin margins, barely profitable, still trying to pay out debt.”

He eventually led the comeback by streamlining production, increasing international sales and focusing on innovation. Revenue quadrupled over the next decade to $2 billion. He handed over the CEO role in 2001 to Stu Thorn, a former executive at another family-owned manufacturing company who became Southwire’s first non-family member to lead the business.

During Thorn’s tenure, Southwire expanded internationally and began making acquisitions of such companies as Coleman Cable and tool manufacturer Maxis. In 2016, electrical industry veteran Rich Stinson took over for Thorn; he spent the next decade accelerating the company’s growth via nine acquisitions before handing over the job off to Baker Hughes veteran Ganesh Ramaswamy in December 2025.

Roy Richards, Jr., meanwhile, has remained chairman all these years even while teaching classes as an adjunct Professor of Strategy at IE Business School in Madrid, Spain for the past 15 years. In his role, he’s been a big proponent of improving Southwire’s environmental record and making it a leader in sustainability. Acknowledging the ways Southwire contributed to environmental damage in the 1970s and 1980s–the EPA found contaminated soil and water around Southwire’s Kentucky aluminum production facility–he has pushed for the company to embrace more sustainable manufacturing and has also gotten behind climate initiatives. That includes chairing Drawdown Georgia, a statewide initiative working to catalyze a Georgia beyond carbon, for a time and setting up Nuthatch LLC. a social enterprise focused on land protection in the Southeastern USA. It has 5,000+ acres under de-development and re-naturalization.

Richards doesn’t claim that Southwire is now beyond reproach but notes that it has deliberately changed. It helps that the next generation of family shareholders have so completely bought into sustainability. Said Roy in 2022, “We want to be the avant-garde, progressives, front end of that change.”

The rapid, controversial development of data centers is a huge opportunity and even bigger test for the climate conscious Southwire. Residents living in rural areas across the nation have alleged that these new data centers cause significant noise pollution and expressed fear of the centers driving up energy bills. Although Southwire is a global business, its business and cultural roots are firmly planted in Georgia, a state that has proposed a bill forbidding local governments from permitting data centers until 2028. (Carrollton itself has one data center and another under development nearby).

Still there is no denying that data centers have led to a glut of opportunity for companies like Southwire in the electrical manufacturing industry. “Acceleration has caused everyone to think differently,” Long says, “[Data centers] are a driver, but they’re not the only beneficiary.”

It’s safe to say that the Richards family, ever elusive, will be one of the big beneficiaries even if they don’t talk about it. Old habits die hard for the family who has upheld Roy Richards’ tradition of keeping the company private. “It's an asset," said Richards in 1976. “There are a lot of advantages to keeping a low profile, and we don't waste time on Securities & Exchange Commission paperwork. At first, none of the bankers knew who we were. Now that's no problem.”