EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This Intersect360 Research report presents the 2022 total market size and five-year forecast for the overall market for scalable, high-performance data center infrastructure for High Performance Computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI), segmented into vertical markets across industry, government, and academia. The forecast horizon is from 2023 through 2027, with compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) using 2022 as a base.
This report presents multiple views of the market for infrastructure for HPC and AI. The “traditional HPC” market view represents HPC user budgets. In most cases, these environments have evolved to include machine learning as part of their overall workloads, and HPC budgets have generally increased because of machine learning; they are still essentially HPC budgets, for systems that would have existed regardless of machine learning. The “expanded HPC-AI” view incorporates the growing effect of spending on scalable infrastructure for AI workloads that is not associated with an HPC budget, i.e., spending that only exists for the sake of machine learning, not HPC. This usually relates to the training of AI models, although in some cases we find scalable clustered systems used for AI inference.
Intersect360 Research defines HPC as the use of servers, clusters, and supercomputers—plus associated software, tools, components, storage, and services—for scientific, engineering, or analytical tasks that are particularly intensive in computation, memory usage, or data management. Additionally, this report tracks similar infrastructure for machine learning and deep learning.
Intersect360 Research reports available in this series include the following segmentations:
- Products and Services: servers, storage, networks, software, service, cloud, other
- Vertical markets: academia, national security, national research labs, national agencies, state or local governments, bio sciences, chemical engineering, consumer product manufacturing, electronics, energy, financial services, large product manufacturing, media and entertainment, retail, transportation, other
- Regions: North America, EMEA, Asia-Pacific, Latin America
- Server class (HPC server revenue): entry-level, midrange, high-end, supercomputer
- Cloud categories (HPC cloud revenue): raw cycles, cloud storage, application hosting (SaaS), infrastructure hosting (IaaS, PaaS), other (traditional HPC model only)
- Software categories (HPC software revenue): operating environments, developer tools, middleware, storage software, transfer costs, application software, other (traditional HPC model only)
- Services categories (HPC services revenue): maintenance and repair, system engineering, system integration, training, programming services, other (traditional HPC model only)
- HPC server market shares (total on-premises HPC and AI, current year only, not forecast)
Worldwide HPC-AI Market Size
This forecast represents a return to steady growth following the recent pandemic-affected years. While some HPC users reported that supply chain issues did affect their ability to spend their complete budgets within the calendar year, the tradtional HPC market revenue grew to $38.1 billion ($38,085 million) in 2022, up 8.1% from 2021.
The expanded HPC-AI market grew to $44.4 billion ($44,431 million) in 2022, up 11.3% from 2021. Compared to the traditional HPC view above, this includes $6.3 billion ($6,346 million) in dedicated AI budgets not associated with HPC. This figure does not include the $17.9 billion spent by the Hyperscale market on AI and HPC infrastructure, which dwarfs the rest of the market.
The HPC market will grow at a 6.1% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2022 through 2027, to reach $51.2 billion ($51,151 million) in 2027. The expanded HPC-AI market will grow at a 6.3% CAGR from 2022 through 2027, to reach $60.4 billion ($60,397 million) in 2027. The slightly higher growth rate between this model and the traditional HPC view in the previous section represents the relatively faster growth of dedicated AI budgets outside of HPC.
The manufacturing and energy segments saw the greatest growth in 2022, as they rebounded from lingering pandemic effects and supply chain disruptions in 2021. The national labs segment also saw double-digit growth, with the delivery of the Frontier supercomputer to Oak Ridge National Laboratory marking the official beginning of the Exascale era. The government sector will be the primer driver of growth over the five-year forecast period.
By the end of the decade, the “pure AI” market will begin to diminish, or else the distinction between scalable, high-performance infrastructure for HPC and machine learning will become less relevant. In the long run, Intersect360 Research expects the two views of the market to merge back together.