Home / Business and Economy / AI Agents Supercharge Server CPU Market
AI Agents Supercharge Server CPU Market
13 Aug
Summary
- Server CPU market forecast raised to over $210 billion by 2030.
- AI agents are shifting CPU to GPU ratio to approximately 1:1.
- CPUs expected to represent 10% of the $2.2 trillion data center market.
Bank of America has raised its outlook for the server CPU market, anticipating it will surpass $210 billion by 2030. This upward revision, from a previous $170 billion estimate, reflects the growing demand for central processing units in data centers fueled by the proliferation of AI agents.
The firm's updated forecast implies nearly a five-fold increase from the projected $35 billion in 2025. The market is now expected to achieve a 36% compound annual growth rate, an increase from the previously estimated 30%.
A key driver for this growth is the evolving balance between CPUs and GPUs. The rise of agentic inference is shifting the typical CPU-to-GPU ratio from 1:4 during the training phase towards an approximate 1:1 for agentic AI applications.
This shift positions CPUs as a vital orchestration control plane, leading Bank of America to project that CPUs will constitute about 10% of the overall $2.2 trillion data center systems market by 2030. This is a notable increase from the roughly 7% share they held in the training era.
The firm views this as an expansion of the total addressable market (TAM) for CPUs, rather than a substitution of existing technologies. Current high demand for GPUs and memory, evidenced by near-record rental and spot prices, points to a widespread compute shortage that likely extends to CPUs.
