Nvidia proved to be king of data center servers and storage in 2023 as artificial intelligence (AI) ballooned in boardroom talks and application deployments, leading to a 224% growth in revenue from GPUs, custom accelerators and FPGA, according to a recent Dell’Oro Group report.

The research found 2023 represented a shift in computing revenues from general purpose to accelerated computing, particularly when compared with the 2022 GPU market’s 46% growth – and projected double-digit growth in 2024.

“Enterprise adoption of AI applications is rising, driving the need for infrastructure in both public cloud and private data centers,” Dell’Oro Sr. Research Director Baron Fung said. “The accelerator market is set to maintain strong growth momentum as the hyperscale cloud service providers deploy next-generation AI infrastructure for larger training models and increasing inferencing demands.”

Can AMD, Intel meaningfully challenge Nvidia?

With 97% of GPU accelerator revenue in 2023, Nvidia dominated this segment of the data center market. Its rivals AMD and Intel represented the remaining 3% of GPU accelerator revenue.

Though a sizable cavern exists between Nvidia and its competitors, AMD and Intel “could gain some share from Nvidia this year,” Fung told SDxCentral. Both underdogs have competitive products that, based on third-party bench testing, are comparable to Nvidia’s H100 platform, which has been in production for a year.

AMD’s “compelling GPU,” the MI300X, will go into volume production later this year, and Intel’s Gaudi3 GPU also poses a competitive alternative to Nvidia GPUs.

But weighing these competitive offerings against each other isn’t always clear-cut. “Testing comparisons are not always apples to apples,” Fung said. The results depend “on how the accelerators are integrated into the infrastructure and what workloads they are targeted for,” he said.

The more important point, however, is that customers will have a broader range of choices and vendors, “which is healthy for the ecosystem,” Fung said.

Nvidia takes data center storage crown, too

In 2023, Nvidia also earned the largest share of server and storage system component revenue, which includes accelerators, CPUs, memory, storage drives and NICs. Dell’Oro estimates Nvidia represented 40% of the market’s revenue.

Market rivals Intel and Samsung both lost share in 2023, with 15% and 10% of server and storage system revenue, respectively. A correction in the server CPU market negatively impacted Intel, and Samsung experienced a correction in the server DRAM market and “heavy price declines for memory,” Fung said.

“Samsung’s share may fluctuate dramatically from year-to-year because of both changes in shipments and also pricing,” he said.