Red card for blue: How AMD is reclaiming the data center

What smelled like a tragic footnote in server history less than a decade ago is now the dominant force in the data center concert: AMD is on the verge of challenging Intel for market leadership in its very own domain – the lucrative, hotly contested server processor segment.

From zero to the 50 percent mark – in one breath

What was AMD’s market share in the server CPU segment in 2017? Put soberly, zero percent. Not even a drop in the ocean. But with the launch of the EPYC “Naples” series, a quiet, almost creeping transformation began – initially ridiculed, later feared. Zen was born, and Zen remained. With EPYC Turin (“Zen 5”) with 128 cores, AMD is now getting serious – so serious that, according to Mercury Research, it expects to have a 50% market share by 2026. A symbolic blow to the heart of Intel – and an economic quake for the entire industry.

Team Blue in neutral

While AMD is working through its roadmap like Swiss clockwork, Intel is tangled up in a management circle that rotates more often than a Windows update on a poor internet connection. Pat Gelsinger may have visions, but visions without clocks are just dreams. Xeon is not technically weak – but compared to EPYC, it is often too expensive, too power-hungry or simply too late on the market. The long-promised Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest combinations are struggling with teething problems, while AMD has long been supplying customers such as Microsoft Azure, Meta or Amazon Web Services in series production. There, performance per watt counts, not legacy.

Report: AMD nears 40% server market share in 1Q25, poised to match Intel in 2026

In 2017, AMD held nearly zero market share in the server processor segment. After CEO Lisa Su implemented a comprehensive platform strategy overhaul, AMD set ambitious goals for annual market share…

— Jukan Choi (@Jukanlosreve) June 11, 2025

Architectural advantage becomes an economic lever

AMD has reduced its EPYC strategy to a very simple mantra: More cores, better efficiency, clearer scaling. Turin, based on Zen 5, not only offers more IPC, but also combines dense and high-performance cores much more intelligently than Intel with its Big.Little attempts in the server sector. For example, the new EPYC 9755 “Turin” with 128 Zen 5 cores delivers almost double the performance of the EPYC 9754 “Bergamo” with Zen 4C – and with comparable power consumption. This is not an evolution, this is a real breakthrough that pulverizes the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) for cloud operators.

AI as a fire accelerator

Ever since OpenAI, NVIDIA, Meta & Co. have been clamouring for ever higher bandwidths, core numbers and inference-optimized workloads, it has been clear that servers are no longer just data cows – they are AI herds with turbo stomachs. AMD is playing to its strengths here: PCIe 5.0, DDR5, CXL and even interposer variants for multi-die implementations if required. Intel? Is lagging behind, partly because it is launching its own AI accelerators (Gaudi 3 sends its regards) too late and too expensive.

Market dynamics: more than just technology

AMD’s success is also a lesson in strategic thinking:

• Delivery capability instead of roadmap foaming at the mouth
• Customer proximity instead of KPI theater
• Innovation without platform constraints

Combined with Intel’s home-grown problems (including processor nodes, execution flaws, overhead structures), the result is a market shift that even the most conservative OEMs can no longer ignore.

Red is the new data center blue

You could call it a historic role reversal. Intel in 2025 looks like AMD around 2010 – ambitious but overstretched. AMD, on the other hand, will look like Intel in the Nehalem era: dominant, innovative, dangerously efficient. If nothing dramatic changes, AMD will be on a par with Intel in the server business for the first time in 2026 – and Intel will only shine in the shadow of its own past.

Source: DigiTimes