High interest rates persisted in third-quarter 2023, crippling corporate purchasing, and causing brand vendors such as Dell and HPE to reduce spending on solutions from new Intel and AMD platforms. Meanwhile, large North American CSPs were shifting their purchases to high-end AI servers amid poor results from the traditional cloud computing sector, which resulted in a continued decline in overall server shipments on a quarterly basis.
Shipments to Meta and Google both dropped by more than 10% quarterly. Shipments for datacenters in China increased slightly, as a result of a comparison to an already very low base in the previous quarter.
Looking ahead to fourth-quarter 2023, overall shipments to large North American CSPs will rebound. Demand is bottoming out, AI server shipments are expanding, and Amazon is aggressively shifting to its own Arm-based platform. Brand vendors' shipments will grow 4.5% sequentially, driven by shipments featuring new processor platforms. Shipments to large CSPs, such as Meta and Amazon, will also rebound, and Taiwanese ODM Wiwynn will outperform its competitors in terms of shipments.
Chart 2: Global shipments by top-10 player, 3Q22-4Q23 (k units)
Chart 4: Taiwan server shipments and global share, 3Q22-4Q23 (k units)
Chart 25: Client-maker partnership matrix, fourth-quarter 2023 (k units)
Chart 26: Client shipment share by maker, fourth-quarter 2023
Chart 27: Maker shipment share by client, fourth-quarter 2023
Chart 28: Client-maker partnership matrix, third-quarter 2023 (k units)
Chart 29: Client shipment share by maker, third-quarter 2023
Chart 30: Maker shipment share by client, third-quarter 2023
Chart 34: Taiwan and global server shipments, 2019-2023 (k units)
Chart 35: Global server shipments by top-10 player, 2022-2023 (k units)
Chart 36: Taiwan server shipments by top maker, 2022-2023 (k units)