A year ago the figure was 15% and the boost has come both from being used in Nvidia’s rack-scale compute platforms and demand from cloud services providers AWS, Alibaba, Microsoft and Google.
AWS plans to deploy 1.2 million Arm CPUs this year.
However, whereas the hyperscalers used to be the main users of Arm CPUs for datacentres, Nvidia has recently become as big a user of Arm processors as the hyperscalers.
“NVIDIA’s Blackwell Ultra GPUs, along with custom accelerators from Google and Amazon, drove the data center IT component market this quarter,” says Baron Fung, Senior Research Director at Dell’Oro Group. “This growth also supported higher revenues for HBM memory, back-end NICs, and Grace ARM CPUs for AI workloads. Custom accelerators are now shipping in volumes comparable to commercial GPUs, although their applications differ across AI and cloud workloads. While overall demand for these general-purpose server components, such as CPUs, NICs, memory, and storage driver remains robust, near-term dynamics such as tariff-driven pull-ins and inventory normalization are affecting revenue patterns.”
The main losers from Arm’s incursion into the datacentre are the x86 vendors Intel and AMD. Arm processors match x86 for performance for many workloads while having an advantage in power efficiency
