Global server shipments are estimated to have surged 7.9% on year to around 16 million units in 2020 and may further rise 5.2% to more than 17 million units in 2021, driven by the booming stay-at-home economy and robust demand for cloud services, according to figures from Digitimes Research's Server Tracker.
Server shipments for cloud services providers including Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google will all continue to surge in 2021 in line with their continued expansion in datacenter construction. This means that their server suppliers in Taiwan, including Quanta Computer, Wiwynn and Foxconn Technology can all embrace bright shipment prospects for the year.
Chinese brand vendors Huawei, Inspur and Lenovo are estimated to ramp up shipments in 2021, but US peers Dell and HPE are expected to see their shipments fall from 2020 as the pandemic has deterred enterprise clients from pulling in shipments.
Sharp on-year increases in server shipments for US datacenter operators have driven up the overall shipment ratio for white-box servers over the past few years, with their shipments as a portion of the world's total server sales growing to 43.2% in 2020 from 38.4% in 2017 and expected to rise further to 44.6% in 2021, Digitimes Research's report forecasts.
Over the years, Taiwan server makers have commanded over 90% of global server supply, but the ratio may fall under 90% in 2021 for the first time ever, as Chinese brand vendors Inspur and Lenovo and US-based vendor Supermicro are boosting their in-house production ratios while Huawei is also ramping up shipments of servers totally produced on its own.
Another significant development is that Intel's global server processor market share already slipped to 87.3% in 2020 from the past peak of 95% and is estimated to fall further to 85.6% in 2021. By contrast, AMD is expected to see the corresponding share advance further to 11.2% this year after rising to 10.1% in 2020, Digitimes Research estimates.
