Building infrastructure for cloud and hybrid cloud implementation is a factor.

Gartner Inc. reported that worldwide server revenue increased 16% in the third quarter of 2017 compared to the same period last year, while shipments increased 5.1% since the second quarter of 2016.

"Global server revenue continued its upward trend in the third quarter of 2017, with notable regional growth," said Jeffrey Hewitt, principal analyst at Gartner. "Building infrastructure for cloud and hybrid cloud implementations was a key driver of growth in the server market during this period."

He added, “x86 server shipments were up 5.3% this year and revenue was up 16.7% in the third quarter of this year, but RISC/Itanium Unix servers showed a more pronounced overall decline, with shipments down 23.5% and vendor revenue down 18.3% year-over-year.”

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) led the global server market in terms of revenue. Despite a 3.2% year-over-year growth rate in the third quarter of 2017, it maintained its top spot with approximately $3.1 billion in revenue and a 21% market share (see Table 1). Dell EMC ranked second, with 37.9% year-over-year growth and a 20.8% market share. Inspur Electronics posted the highest growth rate of 116.6%, driven by revenue generation from Chinese cloud companies and the fruits of its global expansion efforts.