@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20250707

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

- IDC projects a $366B global server market in 2025, 45% y/y growth annually over 2024, 134% y/y growth in Q1 - The European Quantum Act announced its Quantum Strategy aiming to leverage deep science for global quantum leadership by 2030 - TSMC's 3nm fab in Arizona ahead of schedule, first batch of wafers expected in 2027 - US lifts EDA software export restrictions to China [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/HPCNB_20250707.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20250707 appeared first on OrionX.net.

Welcome to HPC News Bites, a weekly show about important news in the world of supercomputing, AI, and other advanced technologies. Hi, everyone. Welcome to HPC News Bites. I'm Doug Black of InsideHPC, and with me is Shaheen Khan of OrionX.net. It seems somewhat beyond belief, but the worldwide server market will reach $366 billion by the end of this year, a growth rate of 45% over 2024, according to International Data Corp. In fact, IDC said the server market reached a record $95.2 billion in the first quarter of the year, growth of 134% over Q1 of last year. The firm said the x86 server market is projected to increase 40% in 2025, while non-x86 servers

will increase 64% year-over-year to $82 billion. Servers with embedded GPUs are projected to grow 47% year-over-year, representing almost 50% of the total market value in the year. Now, Shaheen, I'm trying to imagine what could be driving all this astronomical growth. Excellent question. One must really puzzle over this for a good while. Well, it's probably safe to state the obvious here, maybe maybe that it's the global AI stampede. Actually, IDC does say as much that it's the vast purchasing of GPU equipped servers by hyperscalers and cloud service providers. That has tripled in size in three years.

And guess what? Three years ago, this November is when OpenAI exploded the AI market with ChatGPT. So the big picture is as expected. Most of the market and the growth is driven by GPU servers, and most of that is cloud. And a growing portion of that is the new GPU native clouds. You might hear the word neocloud to refer to this latter group, which is focused specifically

on GPU as a service and is unburdened by the overall data center architecture and processes that big cloud providers built before there was a GPU. There are other interesting findings from IDC. They say that with the launch of large rack-scale configurations, ARM-based servers are gaining traction and growing at a 70% clip and now represent 21% of the market. They also report that the US is the fastest

growing region in the world with a jump of 60% over last year while also representing almost 62% of the total revenue in 2025. China is growing at a rate of 40% year-over-, while accounting for more than 21% of the quarterly revenue worldwide. Europe Middle East Africa showed single digit growth at 7%. There is risk in all that rapid growth, but most participants worry more about falling behind than having misspent their money. News in the quantum technology area continues from companies and governments.

Companies sound increasingly bullish, setting expectations that we will see quantum computing capable of solving real problems in the next five years versus the next ten years. And governments are allocating more funds to make sure they participate while they can before the industry escapes them. This week, the European Commission announced a formal quantum strategy with the objective of making Europe a global leader by 2030. They said quantum technologies would be a €155 billion global market by 2040, and their investment would help the EU retain scientific leadership and improve competitiveness and

security and create thousands of skilled jobs. This is all part of a proposed European Quantum Act that complements the funding that each member government is providing. It envisions a, quote, fully-fledged European quantum ecosystem that builds on its tradition of excellence in quantum research. Europe is certainly a powerhouse in science and has several startups in the quantum space, some of which are globally recognized and have a good market position. But it generally focuses on the use of technology versus building it, and it lags in a robust ecosystem for entrepreneurs, and it is liable to have fragmented strategies as member states

pursue their own plans. The quantum strategy they referenced focuses on five areas and wants to see more private funding in Europe. Those five are research via quantum Europe research and innovation initiative, turning that science into products by allocating 50 million euros as a catalyst for design facilities and six quantum chip pilots, experimenting towards a European quantum internet,

focusing on quantum communication, building a European Quantum Skills Academy in 2026 that leverages quantum competence clusters across the EU, and number five, working with the European Space Agency to form a quantum technology roadmap in space, which would also contribute to the European defense plans. Funding advanced technologies is a challenge and more so when it is a matter of national security. Everyone wants private funds, but it's no guarantee that such funds would remain

steady and would contribute to national security. So we see different approaches in the US, Europe, India, and China. The prevailing opinion is that Europe can do better with respect to private funds. The EU Quantum Act website says, quote, this strategy aims to boost the share of global private funding that European quantum companies receive, currently at around 5%, to stimulate the growth of European startups and scale-ups and promote the uptake of European quantum solutions by European industries." The Associated Press ran a story last week that TSMC's new plant in Arizona, equipped

with a 3-nanometer process, has completed construction and that the company's fab construction schedule has been accelerated. Manufacturing equipment will be moved in as early as September of next year, and the first batch of wafers is expected to be produced in 2027. Shane, we had been hearing a year or two ago about TSMC running into problems with American lack of chip fab construction know-how, and also with Taiwanese work rules expectations. So maybe this news indicates that some of those issues have been dealt with.

It sounds like it, and there certainly is a lot of chip activity in Arizona by TSMC and Intel. So even a rough snapshot can be useful to help center us, though some of it is not confirmed from various publications, including those in Taiwan. On the advanced packaging side of the equation, it appears things aren't moving as quickly in the US for TSMC as chip manufacturing is. According to the story, TSMC's first advanced packaging plant in the US will break ground in the second half of next year and enter production in 2029. But even then it will handle the less advanced processes, which means that the more advanced processes, CoWAS, still needs to be shipped back to Taiwan for processing.

CoWAS is chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, an advanced TSMC packaging technology that enables high-density integration of multiple chips, including logic and memory, on an intermediary layer for electrical connectivity, which is called the interposer. In other techno-political news, we should also mention that the US has lifted export restrictions on chip design software to China for electronic design automation. Those EDA companies, such as Siemens, Synopsys, and Cadence, were subject of restrictions that we reported a couple of weeks ago.

The rules change is part of a deal with China that included imports of rare earth materials from China. All right, that's it for this episode. Thank you all for being with us. HPC News Bytes is a production of OrionX in association with InsideHPC. Shaheen Khan and Doug Black host the show. Every episode is featured on InsideHPC.com and posted on OrionX.net. Thank you for listening.