Server shipments rise despite higher prices as enterprise and government buyers join hyperscaler spending spree.

Server market revenue hit an all-time high of $166.3 billion in the second quarter, representing a 52 percent year-on-year increase. This robust growth stands in stark contrast to the PC market, where unit shipments have declined due to elevated memory prices. Rather than dampening server demand, the higher component costs have instead supported revenue through increased average selling prices, with server shipments themselves growing 15.4 percent year-on-year despite these price pressures.

GPU-accelerated servers drove much of this growth. Average selling prices for these systems climbed nearly 44 percent to $170,200 in Q2, while non-accelerated systems saw prices rise by more than 33 percent to nearly $13,000. Notably, GPU-accelerated servers generated nearly 53 percent of total server market revenue, despite GPU unit shipments actually falling 10.8 percent year-on-year. This reflects both the premium positioning of AI infrastructure and the shift toward higher-end deployments.

Hyperscalers and large cloud providers remain the primary demand driver, yet the market is undergoing a significant compositional shift. According to 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." This expansion into government-backed initiatives and enterprise deployments creates a more stable demand layer, largely insulated from near-term commercial cycles.

The branded server vendors are gaining ground against original design manufacturers (ODMs), the white-box makers that have long dominated hyperscaler procurement. ODM market share fell from over 60 percent a year ago to 53.9 percent in Q2, while non-x86 servers now account for 44.8 percent of total server revenue—a slight decline from the first quarter despite rising absolute revenue from $58.7 billion to $74.4 billion. Dell Technologies led this shift, growing its market share from 7.7 percent to 13.4 percent, followed by Supermicro at 6.1 percent, Lenovo at 5.1 percent, and HPE at 3.5 percent.

Geographically, the United States dominates, generating $112.2 billion—67.4 percent of global revenue. China contributed $26.4 billion, Asia-Pacific excluding China and Japan $10.9 billion, Western Europe $9.1 billion, and Central and Eastern Europe $0.7 billion.