The global server market reached a historic milestone in the second quarter, driven by massive investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure. According to market intelligence firm IDC, vendor revenue surged 52 percent year-over-year to an all-time high of $166.3 billion.
This growth stands in stark contrast to the personal computer market, where high memory costs have dragged down shipments. In the server sector, shipments actually grew by 15.4 percent compared to the same period last year. This increase occurred despite rising average selling prices caused by expensive memory and ongoing component shortages.
Prices rose significantly across both accelerated and traditional systems. The average selling price for GPU-accelerated servers jumped nearly 44 percent to $170,200, even though GPU unit shipments fell by 10.8 percent. Meanwhile, the average price for non-accelerated systems rose more than 33 percent to nearly $13,000.
While hyperscalers and large cloud providers still drive the bulk of the demand, the buyer base is expanding. GPU-accelerated systems for the AI market accounted for nearly 53 percent of total Q2 revenue. However, government agencies and corporate enterprises are now purchasing more AI infrastructure.
"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. Stolarski noted that demand is moving toward specialized cloud providers, sovereign AI programs funded by public capital, and enterprises starting to deploy agentic and inferencing workloads.
Non-x86 servers generated $74.4 billion in revenue, up from $58.7 billion in the first quarter. However, their total market share slipped slightly to 44.8 percent, down from nearly half the market in the previous quarter.
Major brand-name vendors are also clawing back market share from original design manufacturers, which typically supply white-box servers to hyperscalers. The collective revenue share of these manufacturers fell from over 60 percent last year to 53.9 percent in the second quarter.
Dell Technologies led the branded vendors, growing its market share from 7.7 percent last year to 13.4 percent. Supermicro secured the second spot with 6.1 percent, followed by Lenovo at 5.1 percent and HPE at 3.5 percent.
Geographically, the United States remained the dominant market, accounting for $112.2 billion or 67.4 percent of global revenue. China followed with $26.4 billion, while the Asia-Pacific region excluding China and Japan reached $10.9 billion. Western Europe recorded $9.1 billion, and Central and Eastern Europe brought in $0.7 billion. As these global markets adjust, the industry is watching how enterprises continue their initial deployments of agentic and inferencing workloads.
