In the second quarter of 2017, worldwide server revenue increased 2.8 percent year over year, while shipments grew 2.4% from the second quarter of 2016, according to Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com).

"The second quarter of 2017 produced some growth compared with the first quarter on a global level, with varying regional results," said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. "The growth for the quarter is attributable to two main factors. The first is strong regional performance in Asia/Pacific because of data center infrastructure build-outs, mostly in China. The second is ongoing hyperscale data center growth that is exhibited in the self-build/ODM (original design manufacturer) segment.”

x86 servers increased 2.5% in shipments and 6.9% in revenue, according to the research group. RISC/Itanium Unix servers fell globally for the period — down 21.4 percent in shipments and 24.9 percent in vendor revenue compared with the same quarter last year. The “other” CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a decline of 29.5% in revenue.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) continued to lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue. Despite a decline of 9.4%, the company posted $3.2 billion in revenue for a total share of 23% for the second quarter of 2017. Dell EMC maintained the No. 2 position with 7% growth and 19.9% market share. Huawei experienced the highest growth in the quarter with 57.8%.