Nvidia is currently still ahead of competitors in the server GPU market and saw its revenues from the datacenter business reach US$2.98 billion in 2019, nearly three times those of AMD estimated at around US$1 billion.
However, AMD, with support from TSMC's advanced manufacturing processes amid fast growth in the datacenter market, has been gaining market share in the server segment. As the only chip developer with an APU product line that integrates its in-house CPU with GPU, AMD is expected to be able to gradually build a server ecosystem of its own, Digitimes Research believes.
The server business' contribution to Nvidia's revenues has continued rising with the proportion growing from 25% in the company's fiscal 2019 to 27.4% in fiscal 2020 ended January 26, 2020, and to 37% in fiscal first-quarter 2021 ended April 26, 2020.
As applications for high performance computing (HPC) and AI are still in strong demand from the datacenter market, Nvidia and AMD are both optimistic about their sales in the calendar second quarter of 2020 despite the coronavirus pandemic.
Nvidia reported revenues of US$1.14 billion for its datacenter business for its fiscal first-quarter 2021, while AMD's revenues in the first quarter of 2020 are expected to have stayed in high gear thanks to cloud computing service providers' keen deployments of servers during the pandemic.
AMD is also expected to see strong order pull-ins from clients during the second quarter of 2020. AMD also set a goal of having more than 30% of its overall revenues coming from the datacenter business by 2023, showing its determination of making the datacenter business a key focus in the next few years.