Memory shortages take the shine off record-breaking server growth

Global server market sales hit record levels last year, according to new research from IDC, driven by skyrocketing demand for AI infrastructure.

New figures from the consultancy show organizations continue to ramp up infrastructure spending, particularly with top hyperscalers, while large service providers are racing to lead in the AI era.

As a result, the market saw a staggering 80.4% annual growth rate, recording $444.1 billion in revenue. In the last quarter of 2025 alone, revenue reached $125.3 billion – a 52.4% year-over-year increase.

There was a year-over-year increase of 52.4% in vendor revenue compared with the same quarter of 2024. Revenue generated from x86 servers increased 16.9% in the last quarter to $69.8 billion, while non-x86 servers rose by 146.4% to $55.5 billion.

Elsewhere, revenue for servers with an embedded GPU grew 59.1% year-over-year, representing more than half of the total server market revenue.

Memory price surges are a worry

The rising price of certain components, such as GPUs, DRAM, and SSDs, is causing worry. IDC noted that some enterprises have been trying to deal with the problem by securing prices in advance.

However, the impact could be set to hit harder during 2026 as demand keeps outpacing offering capacity in the near term.

“The race for AI adoption is settling the market pace with companies starving for infrastructure looking not only GPUs but also consuming more CPUs, among other components, in order to feed their needs,” said Juan Seminara, research director of Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers.

"We are going to see more price pressures, and that may impact on market dynamics with less units but higher average selling prices going forward."

Dell among the big server market winners

Regionally, the US saw the fastest server market growth, up 72.4% in the fourth quarter of 2024, fueled by 80.1% growth in the accelerated server segment.

Canada grew by 70.7%, for the same reason. EMEA and APeJC, meanwhile, showed double digit growth with 43.6% and 27.9% respectively. PRC and Latin America showed lower growth of 17.7% and 12.8% each, while Japan declined by 4.7%.

Dell Technologies was the clear leader in the OEM market with a 10.0% revenue share, thanks to significant growth on accelerated servers. Supermicro was in second place with 9.5% revenue share for the same reason.

IEIT Systems and Lenovo pretty much tied for third, with 4.1% and 4.0% share respectively, while Hewlett Packard Enterprise finished in fifth place, with a 3.1% share.

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