Higher prices can't crimp server sales as AI drives demand

While high memory costs have hurt PC shipments, the server market continues to grow as AI infrastructure spending spreads beyond hyperscalers to corporate and government buyers. According to market intelligence firm IDC, the second quarter was a bumper one for the server sector, with vendor revenue reaching an all-time high of $166.3 billion. That was a 52 percent increase from the same period last year. The picture for servers therefore differs from that for laptops and desktops. There, unit shipments have fallen as buyers are discouraged by higher prices, driven by shortages of memory components. Yet higher prices have helped larger vendors sustain their revenue. In contrast, server shipments increased by 15.4 percent year-on-year in Q2, despite average selling prices being pushed up by elevated memory pricing and continued supply issues with other components. IDC said average selling prices increased across both GPU-accelerated and non-accelerated systems. Average selling prices for GPU-accelerated servers rose by nearly 44 percent to $170,200, even as GPU unit shipments fell 10.8 percent year-on-year. For non-accelerated systems, average pricing was up by more than 33 percent to nearly $13,000. AI infrastructure investment from hyperscalers and large cloud providers remains the largest source of demand, IDC observes. GPU-accelerated servers for the AI market made up nearly 53 percent of total revenue during Q2. However, it also says that AI server adoption is broadening beyond the largest players into enterprise and government-directed deployments across a growing number of countries, a policy and capex-driven layer of demand that is largely insulated from near-term commercial budget cycles. "The notable shift in the server market this quarter is in who is now buying," said Kuba Stolarski, IDC research vice president for Computing Platforms and Service Provider Infrastructure. "Demand is broadening beyond the largest hyperscalers toward specialized cloud providers (or neoclouds), sovereign AI programs backed by public capital, and enterprises beginning to adopt agentic and inferencing workloads," he added. Non-x86 servers now account for 44.8 percent of all server market revenue, according to IDC. That share has fallen from the first quarter, when they made up nearly half the total, despite the actual revenue figure rising from $58.7 billion to $74.4 billion. Another trend highlighted by IDC is that the big brands are starting to eat into the share of original design manufacturers (ODMs), the so-called white box server makers that have traditionally met the requirements of the hyperscalers. While ODMs collectively still make up the lion's share of server market revenue, this fell from over 60 percent last year to 53.9 percent in Q2. Leading the way is Dell Technologies, whose share rose from 7.7 percent a year ago to 13.4 percent. Supermicro is the second largest player, with 6.1 percent, followed by Lenovo on 5.1 percent, while HPE came fourth with 3.5 percent. The United States remains the biggest server market, generating $112.2 billion in Q2, or 67.4 percent of global revenue. China generated $26.4 billion, while Asia-Pacific excluding China and Japan reached $10.9 billion. Western Europe generated $9.1 billion and Central and Eastern Europe $0.7 billion. (R)