Global server sales recorded their steepest rise in 25 years during the first quarter of 2025, driven by soaring demand for GPU-powered systems. IDC reported revenues of $95.2 billion, up 134% year-over-year, as data centers rushed to meet the explosive growth of artificial intelligence workloads.

IDC projects the market to exceed $360 billion in 2025, a 45% increase from last year, with GPU-based servers set to account for nearly half of all shipments. In 2024, server sales had already jumped 73.5% to $244 billion, fueled by accelerated AI adoption.

“The move from chatbots to reasoning models and agentic AI requires massive new processing power, particularly for inferencing,” noted Kuba Stolarski, VP, IDC Research.

Hyperscalers led spending in Q1: AWS ($24B), Microsoft ($21B), Google Cloud ($17B), and Oracle ($21.2B, double YoY). “Higher CapEx means filling out data centers and building more compute capacity,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz explained.

Enterprise demand was equally strong. Dell Technologies posted $6.3B in server revenue, with AI server orders topping $12B, while HPE reported $4.1B, up 6%.

IDC expects the server market to triple within three years, cementing GPUs as the core of the next data center era.