SuperMicro takes on server leaders as AMD pushes on-premise AI

Market data from analyst IDC has shown that SuperMicro has leapfrogged established server makers Lenovo and HPE as the second-largest PC server maker behind Dell.

SuperMicro experienced growth of almost 134% for the fourth quarter of 2025 with revenue of $11.7bn, which means it accounts for over 9% of the global server market. Dell was ahead with 10% market share and revenue of $12.6bn, while Chinese manufacturer IEIT Systems took the third spot, with revenue of $5.2bn and a 4% market share ahead of Lenovo, which posted revenue of $5.1bn, and HPE ($3.9bn).

“The race for AI [artificial intelligence] adoption is settling the market pace, and with companies starving for infrastructure looking not only at GPUs [graphics processing units], but also consuming more CPUs [central processing units] among other components in order to feed their needs, we are going to see more price pressures, and that may impact on market dynamics with less units but higher average selling prices going forward,” said Juan Seminara, research director of Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers at IDC.

IDC noted that volatile increasing prices on certain components such as GPUs, dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and solid state drives (SSDs) has meant that some companies have been trying to secure prices ahead while the industry is accommodating to the new reality. It predicted that the impact of this price volatility could be hitting harder during 2026 as demand keeps outpacing service capacity in the near term.

Besides Dell, the established server makers seem to be losing ground in the server market. But they appear to be looking at a new market opportunity being pushed by chipmaker AMD, which is the deployment of on-premise PC servers optimised to run agentic AI. 

In a bid to entice IT buyers away from cloud-based AI hardware, AMD has unveiled what it sees as a new category of PC called Agent Computers. In a post on the AMD website, the company described how to run OpenClaw, the open source AI agent, locally on AMD Ryzen AI Max+ processors and Radeon GPUs using a Windows 11 PC with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

AMD said the PC system configured with 128GB unified memory is capable of running “cloud-quality AI agent workloads efficiently” using OpenClaw. According to its own benchmark data, with the Qwen 3.5 35B A3B model, the system delivers around 45 tokens per second and processes 10,000 input tokens in about 19.5 seconds. AMD said the configuration supports a maximum context window of 260,000 tokens, and can run up to six agents concurrently, which it said means it is able to deliver scalable local AI experimentation while maintaining strong responsiveness on consumer hardware.

AMD sees such a system running autonomously rather like the pre-cloud era branch office servers, handling tasks sent by users through a browser user interface on another Windows PC, or via Slack or WhatsApp.

PC makers that have “agent-ready” PCs include HP, Lenovo and Asus. The IDC figures show that revenue for servers with an embedded GPU in the fourth quarter of 2025 grew 59.1% year-over-year, representing more than half of the total server market revenue.

The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ has an integrated GPU, and is currently one of the processor options for PCs certified as Copilot+ devices. While these devices are either laptops or desktop PCs with monitors, AMD’s Agent Computer appears to be positioned as more of a traditional desktop Windows PC running as a server, without a screen or keyboard. The setup AMD provides is optimised to run LM Studio. This uses Ubuntu on the WSL to provide access to large language models, which then work with an OpenClaw server running locally on the same hardware.