Non-x86 Servers Boom Even Faster Than The Rest Of The AI-infused And GPU-hungry Market

Here’s another thing AI can do: Increase revenue from selling servers by 91 percent year-over year, according to analyst firm IDC.

The firm on Wednesday published data on server sales for the final quarter of 2024 and found box-makers earned revenue of $77.3 billion, up from $40.5 billion in Q4 2023.

$54.8 billion of that spend went on x86 servers, a 59.9 percent increase. But revenue from non-x86 servers grew 262.1 percent year over year to $22.5 billion. Sadly, IDC hasn’t said what processor resides within those boxes, but it seems a safe bet to assume much of the non-x86 spend went on Arm-powered processors using custom chips cooked up by the likes of AWS, Microsoft, and Alibaba Cloud. Sorry, IBM and SPARC fans - your preferred platform has almost certainly not made an astonishing comeback.

Original Design Manufacturers – the likes of Foxconn, Quanta, and Inspur – did best, posting 155 percent growth to $36.6 billion of quarterly revenue. That’s more than Dell, Super Micro, HPE and Lenovo combined.

Dell led the pack with $5.5 billion of quarterly server sales, ahead of Super Micro’s $5 billion, HPE’s $4.2 billion and Lenovo’s $3.8 billion. A Chinese vendor named IEIT Systems won $3.9 billion of server revenue.

Revenue for servers with an embedded GPU grew 192.6 percent year-over-year. Across all of 2024, more than half of server market revenue came from servers with an embedded GPU.

Those GPUs were almost certainly acquired to run AI workloads.

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“IDC expects AI adoption to continue growing at a remarkable pace as hyperscalers, [cloud service providers] CSPs, private companies, and governments around the world are increasingly prioritizing those investments,” said Lidice Fernandez , group vice president for the analyst firm’s Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers.

Fernandez may also have an explanation for the big non-x86 spend.

“Growing concerns around energy consumption for server infrastructure will become a factor in datacenters looking for alternatives to optimize their architectures and minimize energy use,” he said.

The United States is the biggest market for servers, accounting for 56 percent of revenue and posting 118 percent revenue growth. China’s share of server revenue grew by 93.3 percent year-over-year growth, well ahead of Japan, APAC and EMEA at 66.9 percent, 43.8 percent, and 28.2 percent respectively.

Latin America was the laggard, with spending up just seven percent. ®