Arm expects to see its architecture account for half of the datacenter CPU market by the end of this year, up from 15 percent in 2024, all thanks to the AI boom.
The Brit chip designer has long touted the AI credentials of chips based on its architecture and is gradually gaining ground in the server market, but Arm's infrastructure chief, Mohamed Awad, now claims that he expects its share of the global market for datacenter processors to surge to 50 percent by the end of the year.
In an interview with Reuters, Awad claimed that Arm's technology typically offers lower power consumption than processors made by rivals such as Intel and AMD. As a result, it was argued, Arm-based products have become increasingly popular even with the big cloud computing companies, which are concerned about the power drain of their massive bit barns.
But going from 15 percent last year to 50 percent by the end of this year would be a massive leap. We asked Arm to confirm if Awad did actually claim this, and how it expects to reach this figure. The Softbank-owned biz said it is largely based on the growth of AI servers.
"In this unprecedented age of AI transformation we are seeing an insatiable demand for computing, with AI servers set to grow by more than 300 percent in the next few years," Awad said in a follow-up note to The Register.
"For that to scale, power efficiency is no longer a competitive advantage – it is a baseline industry requirement. This is where the Arm Neoverse compute platform is the clear leader, and the compute platform of choice for industry-leading partners including AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia," he claimed.
The chip designer has been seeing its architecture increasingly deployed by the big three cloud operators just mentioned. In 2023, Bernstein Research estimated that nearly 10 percent of servers across the world contain Arm application processors as their primary brains, and half of those were deployed by Amazon, which said it had more than two million of its custom Graviton chips in the cloud.
Microsoft and Google were relatively late to the custom Arm processor party, with the Chocolate Factory basing its Axion chip on the designer's Neoverse V2 blueprint, while Redmond announced general availability of its own Cobalt 100 Arm CPUs in the Azure cloud later in the year.
Scaling deployments by all three cloud providers could account for some of the increase that Awad is forecasting for this year, but Nvidia products are also likely to account for a significant share.
The DGX GB200 NVL72 rack system comprises 36 of Nvidia's Grace CPUs and 72 Blackwell GPUs, for example, making for 2,592 Arm Neoverse V2 cores in each unit deployed, and these are likely to be in demand this year.
But it is also easy to overlook other products in the datacenter that have Arm-based cores inside them, such as SmartNICs and DPUs (data processing units) such as Nvidia's BlueField-3, and also the Nitro server management cards in AWS servers.
Arm's AI ambitions also extend beyond the datacenter, as chief exec Rene Haas enthused in an earnings conference call late last year.
"I think when we look at what's going on with AI and when you think about AI, it's not just training in the datacenter, but it's inference in the datacenter, it's inference across different parts of the overall value chain, the network, the automobile, the PC, the mobile phone, the wearable, which can be kind of what people would call the edge," he claimed.
Arm's parent SoftBank recently announced its intention to acquire Ampere, a chip firm that sells server processors based on the Arm architecture. Ampere told The Register it is expanding out from the cloud companies it initially targeted with an eye on the telecoms market. ®