AMD continues to grow; Nvidia takes step up as well, according to Mercury Research
AMD (Nasdaq:AMD) continues to take market share from Intel, growing at a faster rate and closing the gap between the two companies to the narrowest it has ever been.
In the first quarter of 2025, AMD’s share of the server marketplace rose to 27.2%, up sequentially from 25.7% and up year over year from 23.6% in Q1 of 2024, according to the latest findings from Mercury Research.
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Conversely, Intel continues to shed market share, falling to 72.8% in Q1 of 2025, down from 74.3% in Q4 of 2024 and down from 76.4% in Q1 of 2024.
Dean McCarron, president of Mercury, said it’s not AMD stealing Intel business but mostly a case of AMD growing faster than Intel. “AMD’s growth rate in the quarter was multiples of Intel’s, resulting in significant server share gains,” he said in a research note.
“Server processor shipments were definitively the stand-out segment in the first quarter results, growing sequentially in a seasonally down quarter and seeing substantial growth — nearly 20 percent — on an on-year basis, with both suppliers seeing unit increases, reputedly in part due to increased demand from hyper-scale customers.”
AMD’s server share set a record high at 27.2% overall, and while not an official measure of share, on an Epyc v. Xeon SP basis, AMD’s share was also a record at 35.9%. The Xeon SP is the high-end of the Xeon and competes directly with Epyc but Mercury compares Epyc and Xeon sales in their totality.
In terms of market share, Q1 2025 is the lowest share in server CPUs Intel has seen. In terms of units, however, Intel has seen lower quarterly units than this in 2024 and in 2014 and earlier, McCarron said.
ARM continues to make its presence felt, accounting for 13.2% of total server sales in Q1 2025. McCarron warned that estimates for ARM sales were not as accurate as x86 sales due to what he called “captive suppliers,” vendors such as Amazon Web Services that make their own processors,
The bigger story is that once again the 800-pound gorilla that is Nvidia took over yet another space. With one quarter of sales of its GB200 CPU/GPU combination, Nvidia grew the size of the ARM server CPU market by close to 50% and drove the share gains.
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