The Global Server Market Hit $77.3 Billion Thanks to AI-Driven Workloads

The global server market surged 91% in 2024, officially reaching a whopping $77.3 billion.

As AI-driven workloads pushed demand to new heights, AI-ready servers also saw nearly 200% growth.

Naturally, the growth forces businesses to rethink their infrastructure needs — and Tim Timrawi of Sharktech, a cloud and infrastructure provider, has a front-row seat.

“We’ve seen firsthand the surging demand for high-performance servers and GPU infrastructure, especially as AI workloads and machine learning applications become mainstream across industries,” said Timrawi.

Another trend is that companies aren’t just experimenting with AI anymore: They’re integrating it directly into business operations.

“These record-breaking numbers are more than just a headline — they’re a green light for us to double down on infrastructure innovation and capacity planning,” Timrawi added.

But this shift requires more than just GPUs, noted Stefan Ideler, co-founder and technology leader at i3D.net.

AI-ready servers need specialized hardware designed to handle real-time model execution — not just training.

“Organizations are becoming more sophisticated in how they integrate AI, typically by combining multiple models,” said Ideler.

“We are seeing growing interest in physical server solutions that include GPUs, VPUs, and dedicated chipsets for inference and model switching.”

Of course, the surge in AI processing comes with major challenges: power consumption and cooling.

“The biggest challenge that AI has brought to our industry is having enough power and cooling at the data center level,” said Radic Davydov, CEO of ReliableSite.

To tackle this, many companies are adopting liquid cooling, renewable energy sources, and more efficient chip designs.

For example, Supermicro recently introduced H100 servers with liquid cooling and is already shipping more than 10,000 GPUs per quarter.

Infrastructure providers, take note: Supermicro manufactures all components in-house, which cuts deployment times from months to mere weeks.

Nvidia currently dominates the AI chip market with more than a 90% share, which helped position the U.S. at the forefront of global server revenue with a whopping 56%.

China follows with 25% of global revenue, but with U.S. chip export restrictions in place, companies like Huawei and Alibaba are developing their own alternatives.

This comes as no surprise since the push for specialized AI hardware is clear in numbers.

While traditional x86 servers grew nearly 60% in 2024 ($54.8 billion), alternative server types surged 262.1% to $22.5 billion.

But is the chip war just getting started?

AMD, Intel, Cerebras, and Tenstorrent are making aggressive plays for market share.

Recent benchmarks show AMD’s MI300X and Intel’s Gaudi chips beginning to rival Nvidia’s H100 GPUs.

Meanwhile, countries are increasing efforts toward AI self-reliance. Taiwan, France, and other European nations are investing in homegrown AI systems to reduce reliance on U.S. tech giants.

Taiwan is scaling semiconductor production, while France’s Mistral AI and Germany’s Aleph Alpha are building foundation models to compete with OpenAI and Google DeepMind.

Some U.S. enterprises are also investing in themselves.

Chip designer Arm plans to sell its own AI chips, which could put it in direct competition with long-time customers like Qualcomm, Apple, and Nvidia.

Meanwhile, SoftBank spent $6.5 billion to acquire Ampere Computing.

Since Ampere specializes in designing high-performance processors for AI workloads, it’s an investment that could give non-hyperscalers the chance to develop their own custom AI chips.

Who knows? By this time next year, we may be looking at an entirely new roster of names.