TrendForce: Growth in General-Purpose Servers Is Constrained; 2026 Overall Server Shipment Growth Forecast Lowered to +13%

TrendForce stated yesterday that strong market demand for AI servers has tied up production capacity for components needed in general-purpose servers, thereby impacting the delivery capacity of general-purpose servers. Based on this, the firm has lowered its forecast for overall server shipment growth in 2026 from the previous +20% to +13%.

General-purpose and AI servers share similar component requirements, with both relying to some extent on the same PCB, CPU, PMIC, and BMC production capacity. However, upstream suppliers are prioritizing their limited manufacturing capacity for higher-margin AI-oriented products. This has resulted in PMIC delivery lead times of 35–40 weeks and BMC lead times of 21–26 weeks for general-purpose servers.

The firm estimates that global AI server shipments will grow by 28% year-over-year this year, with ASIC-based solutions growing faster than GPU-based solutions. However, since tuning in-house AI ASICs is more time-consuming, the firm has slightly adjusted the share of ASIC-based solutions in the overall AI server market from nearly 28% to around 27%.