Global server shipments are expected to see a CAGR of 6.7% from 2020-2025, driven by demand for datacenter, HPC, AI and 5G related applications, according to Digitimes Research's latest five-year forecast for the server industry.
First-tier public cloud services providers' expansions for their infrastructures will be the key growth driver as enterprises accelerate their paces of moving their systems to public cloud platforms to enable remote work and study. Demand for e-commerce has also been rising in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, with the stay-at-home economy likely to persist.
Chip developers including Intel, AMD and Nvidia have been keenly developing next-generation CPU and GPU solutions to satisfy demand for high-performance computing (HPC), AI-acceleration and parallel computing applications.
Nvidia's plan to acquire Arm is expected to allow the company to roll out AI-acceleration solutions that combine Arm-based CPU with its GPU and the InfiniBand high-speed network technology, and boost Arm CPUs' share in the server market.
Several chip developers, in addition to improving the capability of their CPUs and GPUs, are also devoted to developing InfiniBand and high-speed Ethernet solutions, looking to upgrade datacenters' network standard transmission speed to 400GB/s.
Server shipments for core network and edge network datacenters will also gradually expand after 2020 as telecom operators worldwide increase their investments in establishing 5G datacenters, Digitimes Research's findings show.