The Hot Take: I question this very much.
Servers employing x86 chips from AMD and Intel now account for little more than half of server revenue, according to the latest figures from IDC. In its Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker for Q1 2026, the analyst firm says that non-x86 server revenue hit $58.7 billion, representing a startling increase of 107 percent over the same period last year. The results mean that those non-x86 servers make up 47.9 percent of the market revenue, closing in rapidly on the amount of cash spent on x86 boxes. The growth in non-x86 turnover is likely thanks to systems powered by Nvidia’s AI chips featuring Arm cores. Although there is high demand for these, they also cost a pretty packet compared to an average datacenter box. In fact, IDC noted a stark divide shaping the worldwide server market, which reached $122.6 billion in vendor revenue during this period, a 30.4 percent increase year-on-year. On the one hand, AI infrastructure investment from hyperscalers and large cloud providers is “running at a scale that shows no sign of plateauing,” while everything else - the non-accelerated segment - faces a supply-constrained environment, thanks largely to that AI infrastructure spending. As Reg readers will know, memory chipmakers are prioritizing manufacturing capacity for higher margin products for AI servers and GPUs, starving the rest of the market of supply. Component availability, particularly DRAM and NAND flash, is limiting near-term shipment volumes from vendors, IDC says, though order pipelines are strong. Supply of the right chips is therefore the chief limiting factor on server market growth. Revenue for x86 servers still reached $63.9 billion, but this was a decline of 2.9 percent due to those component supply constraints impacting shipment volumes. GPU accelerated servers pulled in $68.9 billion for the vendors, up nearly 25 percent year-on-year, while other accelerated servers surged a massive 122 percent to $17.7 billion. The latter category represents AI systems configured with FPGAs or ASICs rather than GPUs. IDC’s spin on the data is that AI infrastructure adoption is no longer limited to hyperscalers, thanks to developments such as government-led sovereign AI initiatives, while the non-accelerated segment tells a more nuanced story. Although revenue here declined, underlying demand remains strong, but many enterprise customers are holding out against elevated component prices. “Companies aren’t pulling back from infrastructure investment; they’re just not getting servers as fast as they need them. Longer term, emerging workloads, including agentic applications and physical AI ecosystems, will keep demand elevated well beyond the current cycle,” commented IDC research director Juan Seminara. The firm says it expects to see supply normalization beginning in 2027, with capacity relief coming as chipmakers bring new fabrication plants online. Across the last two decades, non-x86 servers accounted for less than ten percent of revenue, and most of that went to IBM which emerged as the last vendor of proprietary servers as Oracle lost interest in Sun and the likes of HPE decided they couldn't sustain businesses built on exotic architectures. ®
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The Hot Take: ARM seems to be breaking out from everywhere. Fujitsu, Nvidia, AWS and ARM. Qualcomm seems to be playing catch up in the server market from the looks of it.
AWS has provided a first look at its next-generation Graviton5 processor, a custom server CPU developed by Annapurna Labs for deployment across the company's cloud computing platform and AI inference infrastructure.
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The Hot Take: I'm interested in the Surface with this chip to get a decent GPU on an ARM setup and play with ARM Windows more personally. Only professionally worked with it and that was only an inch deep.
Computex 2026 and GTC Taipei will go down in history as the moment NVIDIA used to officially announce its entrance into the PC market. During his keynote at the Taipei Music Center, CEO Jensen Huang announced the RTX Spark – formerly codenamed N1 and N1X – which will power an array of premium laptops and small form factor systems coming this
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The Hot Take: Will have to see what the final products show us.
The N1X reportedly comes in two SKUs: a top-end 20-core option with 6,144 CUDA cores matching the desktop RTX 5070, and a cut-down 18-core option with 5,120 CUDA cores. The standard N1 also has two configs, one with a 12-core CPU and 2,560 CUDA cores and a 10-core model with 2,048 CUDA cores.
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The Hot Take: Only time will tell on this one. I don't think so but we'll see here soon enough.
A new report from GF Securities (via SeekingAlpha) claims NVIDIA is gearing up to use its June 1st Computex keynote to pitch its upcoming Arm-based Vera CPU as an x86 killer. The financial analysts claim NVIDIA will boast that Vera delivers up to "1.5x faster speeds, 2x the performance, and 4x the density per rack," as compared to traditional
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The Hot Take: Licensee's mad? I think so.
Arm was notified by the US Federal Trade Commission in early 2026 that it was the subject of an antitrust investigation after the chip designer said it would begin engineering its own processors, according to Bloomberg. The FTC is examining whether Arm used its dominant position in chip licensing to deny or downgrade the quality of CPU blueprints it licenses to others in order to disadvantage rivals. The regulator asked Arm to cooperate and preserve related documents.
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The Hot Take: Have they given up in trying to infiltrate the WinTel market to go for them Ai dollars?
The strategic significance of Arm's current transformation lies in its transition from a volume-dependent mobile component provider to a value-driven infrastructure architect. As the global smartphone market faces structural saturation, the organization is pivoting toward Agentic and Physical AI to redefine its commercial relevance. The core of this strategy is to increase the average selling price per chip by packing higher complexity—measured in core density and orchestration capabilities—into each unit, thereby ensuring revenue growth even as hardware shipment volumes stabilize.
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The Hot Take: So was ARM not breaking into the WinTel market so they shifted to Ai market or are they just chasing the highest dollars?
Investment bank UBS reckons agentic AI will send CPU demand soaring, with Arm and AMD best placed to grab the spoils.
UBS analysts believe the growth of agentic AI software will drive strong demand for CPUs in the AI era. The bank said agentic AI increases processor workloads and favours chips with higher core counts and better power efficiency.
That view gives Arm the biggest potential upside, followed by AMD. Intel could benefit too, since a growing total addressable market tends to lift more than one silicon boat.
In fresh coverage of British chip design house Arm, UBS said CPU demand is surging. The bank said agentic AI computing will favour chips with higher core counts and a bias towards power efficiency.
UBS reckons the total server market could grow five times by calendar year 2030. It put the figure at $170bn, up from $30bn in calendar year 2025.
Within that market, UBS expects Arm to benefit the most. The bank said Arm could potentially grab as much as 40-45 per cent of the total share, which would make the x86 crowd choke on its roadmaps.
The bank’s report cited expert comments behind three main themes explaining the surge in CPU demand. The first is that agentic AI workloads rely more heavily on CPU cores.
That shift is expected to require a three- to fivefold increase in CPU core counts per user and per GPU. Servers with standalone CPUs will need more chips, which is the kind of problem chip sellers enjoy having.
UBS said that demand for agentic AI will push some workloads to local PCs. It pointed to Anthropic’s Claude Code as an example.
The need for higher core counts and power efficiency should tilt demand first towards Arm and then AMD. That sounds grim for anyone still selling yesterday’s watt-guzzling boxes as tomorrow’s AI answer.
Chipzilla could still serve this market through its Coral Rapids platform, according to UBS. The catch is that benefiting from a bigger market and winning the best bits of it are not quite the same trick.
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The Hot Take: Apple to me is starting to look better and better I hate to say it.
It wouldn't be Google if it did not somehow try to hobble its Tensor-class chips. And, this unfortunate trend appears all set to continue with the upcoming Tensor G6 SoC, which is quite likely to sport a GPU that launched all the way back in 2021! A new leak indicates that the Google Tensor G6 chip will sport the PowerVR CXT-48-1536 GPU that debuted in 2021 As our readers would be well aware, we had ripped into Google a few months back for using generations-old ARM CPU cores within the Tensor G5 chip. Thankfully, as per recent leaks, Google has […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/google-tensor-g6-chip-likely-to-launch-with-an-ancient-gpu-that-debuted-around-5-years-back/
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The Hot Take: Interesting, is this feedback because people STILL want high performance parts? To me it looks like they've all been trying to push us to mid-range devices that we're not supposed to own either.
NVIDIA’s plans to enter the APU market are becoming clearer, as new leaks outline the specifications and timeline for its upcoming N1X SoC. The chip represents a shift for NVIDIA, combining an Arm-based CPU with a Blackwell GPU in a single package aimed at high-performance laptops and compact desktop systems.
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