Bare metal boom: On-prem server sales for HPC and AI up 20% this year

On-premises high-performance compute (HPC) is still in demand, according to Hyperion Research, which estimates the market is expanding at almost 20 percent year-on-year, often driven by requirements for AI processing.

What Hyperion calls the "on-premises HPC and AI-for-Science" server market showed significant growth in the first half of 2026, with revenues hitting $16.5 billion, up 19.9 percent.

However, the analyst says unit shipments over the same period grew only 4.4 percent, meaning that systems are carrying a higher price tag due to greater use of costly components such as GPUs and other accelerators, not to mention the effects of higher memory costs, which have tripled or quadrupled since last year.

Its tracking of the HPC market is based on multiple surveys conducted of both buyers and suppliers, the firm says. The latest data shows a major change in the overall HPC market growth, heavily driven by a combination of the use of AI, large language models (LLMs), and purchases of …