Ampere Computing Gaining Ground in the Data Center CPU Landscape

Once upon a time, the data center market was dominated by x86-64 manufacturers AMD and Intel. However, in recent years, companies have begun developing custom Arm-based processors to handle more complex workloads within smaller power envelopes and more efficiently. According to Counterpoint Research, we have the most recent data highlighting a significant new player in the data center world called Ampere Computing. The latest data center revenue share report includes revenue for Intel/AMD x86-64 and AWS/Ampere Arm CPUs. For the first time, we see a third-party company, Ampere Computing, capture up to 1.54% of the total data center market revenue in 2022. Because CPUs are available in off-the-shelf servers from OEMs, enterprises and cloud providers can easily integrate Ampere Altra processors.

Intel, the market's largest player, saw a 70.77% share of total revenue; however, this is a decrease from 2021 data, which stated an 80.71% revenue share in the data center market. This represents a 16% decrease year on year. This decrease is not due to a lack of demand for server processors, as the global data center CPU market revenue fell only 4.4% year on year in 2022, but rather to a high demand for AMD EPYC solutions, with team red capturing 19.84% of the revenue from 2022. This represents a 62% increase over last year's revenue share of 11.74%. AMD is slowly but steadily eating Intel's lunch. Another source of revenue is Amazon Web Services (AWS), which the company has filled with its Graviton CPU offerings based on Arm ISA. AWS Graviton CPUs accounted for 3.16% of market revenue in 2021, a 74% increase from 1.82% in 2021.