NEEDHAM, MA - Server sales reached a record $77.3 billion during the fourth quarter, the second highest growth rate since 2019 with a year-over-year increase of 91% in vendor revenue.

Revenue generated from x86 servers increased 59.9% in Q4 to $54.8 billion while Non-x86 servers increased 262% year over year to $22.5 billion, said IDC, which tracks the data.

Revenue for servers with an embedded GPU in the fourth quarter of 2024 grew 193% year-over-year. For full year 2024, more than half of the server market revenue came from servers with an embedded GPU. Nvidia continues dominating the server GPU space, with over 90% of the total shipments with an embedded GPU in Q4. The fast pace at which hyperscalers and cloud service providers have been adopting servers with embedded GPUs has fueled server market growth, which has more than doubled in size since 2020 with revenue of $235.7 billion in 2024.

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

Server Regional Market Results

The US is the second-fastest growing region in the server market, behind Canada, with an increase of 118.4% compared to the last quarter of 2023, but US revenues represent 56% of the total revenue in Q4 while Canada accounts for 1.1% of total revenue globally. China is also growing at a faster rate than other regions, with 93.3% year-over-year growth in Q4 and accounting for almost a quarter of the quarterly revenue worldwide. Japan, APeJC and EMEA had double-digit growth during the quarter at 66.9%, 43.8% and 28.2% respectively. Latin America grew 7%.

Server Market Standings, by Company

Dell Technologies and Supermicro ended Q4 in a statistical tie for the top position with 7.2% and 6.5% revenue share, respectively. Both companies had double-digit growth in revenue with Dell increasing 20.6% year-over-year while Supermicro was up 55% year over year. The next three companies Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IEIT Systems and Lenovo, are statistically tied for the second position in the market, with shares between 5.5% and 4.9%.

The ODM Direct group of vendors accounted for 47.3% of total revenue in Q4an increase of 156% year over year to $36.6 billion dollars.

Taxonomy Notes

IDC defines a server system as a multiuser computing device that accesses and delivers services via a network. The server and the applications that run on it are typically shared by multiple users. Unlike a client device, a server does not usually have a user interface that is intended for human-machine interaction. A typical server system entails one or more processors, a motherboard, memory, internal disk or flash storage, a bundled operating system (OS), power supply units, and network interfaces.