Fourth-quarter 2022 global server shipments declined 7.1% from the prior quarter and 4.3% from the prior year as China-based datacenter operators, as well as server brands, exhibited sluggish shipment momentum while cloud service providers including Meta and Google had weakening demand.
Going into first-quarter 2023, amid the global economic slump, large US- and China-based datacenter operators are likely to further cut back their server procurement, while demand from server brands including Dell and HPE will also decelerate. First-quarter 2023 global server shipments are estimated to fall 10% compared to both the prior quarter and the corresponding period of 2022.
In sum, large North American datacenter operators had exhibited stronger server demand driving whole-year 2022 global server shipments. Particularly, the aggregated server procurement by the top-3 public cloud service providers – Amazon, Microsoft and Google – showed the strongest on-year growth, reaching nearly 30%.
Chart 2: Global shipments by top-10 player, 4Q21-1Q23 (k units)
Chart 4: Taiwan server shipments and global share, 4Q21-1Q23 (k units)
Chart 34: Taiwan and global server shipments, 2018-2022 (k units)
Chart 35: Global server shipments by top-10 player, 2021-2022 (k units)
Chart 36: Taiwan server shipments by top maker, 2021-2022 (k units)
