According to TrendForce, the momentum of server shipments in 2021 will continue to be driven by the new normal after the epidemic, including the data center construction plans of major global cloud service providers, the acceleration of enterprise cloud migration, as well as roadside servers for self-driving cars, Industry 4.0 and other technologies develop.

However, due to the slight slowdown in the introduction of Intel (Intel) and AMD (AMD) platforms into brand factories, and the delay of some new infrastructure projects in China, the quarterly growth rate of overall server shipments in the second quarter will be higher than the original forecast. 19.6%, revised down to 17.7%, but deferred orders are expected to boost shipment performance in the second half of this year.

TrendForce said a month ago that the supply chain length of the server market has not been resolved, and the lead-time of some key components has been extended. However, recently, the production of smartphones in India has been severely impacted by the local epidemic again, forcing the brand factory to reduce the production quantity, and the relevant production materials have been reduced accordingly.

Therefore, TrendForce believes that the key components required for servers will be able to meet production needs from the second quarter, and the problem of long and short materials is gradually being resolved.

The new platforms of Intel and AMD are about to be mass-produced, and the procurement of servers from major CSP manufacturers in the third quarter will not decrease

From the perspective of the layout of major cloud service providers (CSPs) in the first half of the year, GCP, AWS, Azure and Facebook in North America have more positive momentum in server procurement than before, and the previous two have the strongest strength. It is expected that in the third quarter, major manufacturers will continue to increase their server purchasing power, driven by the mass production of Intel and the new platform of Chaowei.

In China, the demand for Baidu, ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent in the first half of the year only came from the expansion of domestic operations in China; overseas expansion was less active. In addition to the impact of the Lunar New Year and holidays, the purchasing power of servers was weak.

This year’s procurement momentum will be mainly concentrated on Tencent and Baidu, mainly due to the expansion of the scale of second-tier players to lease cloud services in Tencent; Baidu will focus on the deployment of roadside equipment in response to the development of self-driving cars, which will drive server demand.

Server-related memory purchases have not cooled yet, and prices will rise again in the third quarter

In the face of the continuously expanding server procurement demand, although DRAM factories have actively shifted their production capacity to server DRAM, they have not yet fully met the market demand. Therefore, TrendForce estimates that server DRAM prices may increase by another 3-8% in the third quarter.

For the Enterprise SSD segment, the purchase volume is expected to increase significantly due to the upcoming shipments of Intel and Chaowei’s next-generation platforms in the third quarter. In particular, the demand for notebook computers continues to be strong this year, and the overall NAND Flash supply market situation in the third quarter will follow suit. The peak season for the production of consumer Electronic products is coming, and the supply is relatively tight, so it is predicted that the price will increase by nearly 10%.