A Deep Dive Into Datacenter And Server Spending Forecasts
The Next Platform, Monday, April 7th, 2025
Spending on AI systems in 2024 just utterly blew by the expectations of the major market researchers and those who dabble in metrics like we do.
There has just been an unprecedented amount of spending, mostly for systems that are accelerated by Nvidia GPUs. It remains to be seen how this spending will hold up, and any forecasts we can talk about today do not necessarily take into account the Second World Trade War that the United States is waging right now.
And so take the following analysis of datacenter server and storage spending and a drilldown on server spending in particular, which is based on data just published by IDC, with a grain of salt. This is meant to complement the drilldown into Gartner's GenAI spending we did last week. With all of the noise about GenAI, it is helpful to remember that GenAI is not driving even half of the AI use cases out there, even if that day is coming and GenAI could come to dominate as the overall AI landscape.