The global server market reached a historic record in the first quarter of 2025, driven by demand for GPUs and the rise of artificial intelligence.
During the first three months of 2025, global server sales skyrocketed by 134% year-over-year, reaching $95.2 billion, according to the latest IDC report. This is the largest quarterly growth recorded in the past 25 years, and it’s just a preview of what’s to come: IDC estimates that the market will reach $366 billion by the end of this year, representing an increase of 45% compared to 2024.
The main driver of this growth is clear: generative artificial intelligence and particularly the need for servers with high graphic processing unit (GPU) capabilities. According to IDC, servers with built-in GPUs will account for almost half of the market in 2025.
From Chatbots to Agent AI: The Exponential Leap
The demand is not merely for chatbots like ChatGPT, but for a much more ambitious technological evolution. “The transition from basic conversational models to reasoning models and intelligent agents requires several orders of magnitude more processing power, especially for inference tasks,” explains Kuba Stolarski, vice president of research at IDC.
This leap is translating into a radical transformation of data centers, both in the cloud and in on-premises enterprise installations. The infrastructure is adapting to a new era of AI, where models not only process language but learn to make decisions, plan actions, and operate autonomously.
Record Investments from Tech Giants
Major cloud providers have been quick to respond. During the first quarter of 2025:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) invested $24 billion in CapEx.
- Microsoft, $21 billion.
- Google Cloud, $17 billion.
- Oracle, in a surprising escalation, doubled its CapEx to reach $21.2 billion.
These figures reflect a massive effort to expand data centers and acquire servers with advanced AI acceleration. “When we see this increase in CapEx, it means we’re filling our data centers and purchasing components to build our computers,” said Oracle CEO Safra Catz during the earnings presentation in June.
Dell and HPE Also Capitalize on the Boom
It’s not just the big tech companies benefiting. Dell Technologies reported revenues of $6.3 billion in its server and networking segment (a 16% year-over-year increase), with over $12 billion in AI server orders, surpassing the total shipments of the previous year.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), for its part, saw a 6% year-over-year increase in server revenues, reaching $4.1 billion in the quarter ending April 30.
ARM and x86 Servers Also Experience Growth
According to IDC, the market for servers based on x86 architecture will grow by 39.9% in 2025 to $283.9 billion, while non-x86 (including ARM) will grow even more, by 63.7%, to $82 billion.
Notably, the growth of ARM-based servers will increase by 70%, representing 21.1% of total shipments for the year. This architecture is gaining ground due to large-scale rack configurations and its energy efficiency compared to traditional models.
The United States and China Lead the Expansion
Geographically, the United States is leading the growth, with a 59.7% year-over-year increase, accounting for nearly 62% of the total market in 2025. China is also growing strongly at 39.5%, making up more than 21% of global revenues in the quarter.
Other regions with notable growth include:
- Japan: +33.9%
- APeJC (Asia Pacific excluding Japan and China): +10.8%
- EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa): +7%
- Latin America: +0.7%
- Canada: -9.6% (affected by a large atypical operation in 2024)
AI Infrastructure: Toward a New Era?
This hardware boom is inseparable from the phenomenon of generative AI and advancements toward increasingly sophisticated models. Projects like Stargate, which promises to invest up to $500 billion to create general artificial intelligence (AGI), or the launch of the reasoning model DeepSeek R1, underscore the tech race that is redefining data centers.
While models are expected to become more efficient in their resource use, the volume is also growing. According to IDC, the challenge will be to “scale efficiency for multi-user environments” and ensure that high-level models can operate without exhausting resources, which would be key to achieving AGI.
Conclusion
The server market is not just growing: it is being reinvented. The surge in artificial intelligence, the demand for GPUs, record investments in infrastructure, and the shift toward more efficient architectures are converging into a new era for the global tech ecosystem.
If IDC’s forecasts hold true, in just three years the market will have tripled, shaping a future where servers are no longer just computing machines, but pillars of an intelligence increasingly closer to human levels.