Arm Muscles Into Server Market – But Can't Wrestle Control From X86 Just Yet

Arm-based servers are rapidly gaining traction in the market with shipments tipped to jump 70 percent in 2025, however, this remains well short of the chip designer's ambitions to make up half of datacenter CPU sales worldwide by the end of the year.

Market watcher IDC says Arm servers are attracting mass interest thanks mainly to the launch of large rack-scale configurations, referring to systems such as Nvidia's DGX GB200 NVL72, designed for AI processing.

In its latest Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, IDC estimates that servers based on the Arm architecture will account for 21.1 percent of total global shipments this year - not the 50 percent touted by Arm infrastructure chief Mohamed Awad in April.

Servers with at least one GPU fitted, sometimes styled as AI-capable, are projected to grow 46.7 percent, representing almost half of the total market value for this year. The fast pace of adoption by hyperscale customers and cloud service providers is fueling the server market, which IDC says is set to triple in size over just three years.

The server market as a whole reached a record $95.2 billion in Q1 2025, growing 134.1 percent year-on-year. As a result, IDC bumped up its forecast for the entire year to $366 billion, equating to a 44.6 percent rise. This would be an all-time high.

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The "industry standard" x86 segment is projected to grow 39.9 percent during 2025 to reach $283.9 billion, while non-x86 systems are expected to grow faster at 63.7 percent year over year, with a forecast total of $82 billion.

IDC's regional market projections anticipate the US having the highest expansion with a 59.7 percent jump over 2024, which would see it account for almost 62 percent of the total server revenue by the end of 2025.

China is the other region heating up in the sales stakes, with IDC forecasting growth of 39.5 percent to make up more than 21 percent of the quarterly revenue worldwide. EMEA and Latin America are in single-digit growth territory at 7 and 0.7 percent, respectively, while Canada is expected to decline 9.6 percent this year due to an unspecified "very large deal" that happened in 2024.

Commenting on the server growth, IDC's veep for worldwide infrastructure research, Kuba Stolarski, said the demand for more compute power to handle AI processing is likely to persist.

"The evolution from simple chatbots to reasoning models to agentic AI will require several orders of magnitude more processing capacity, especially for inferencing." ®