Spending in the global cloud infrastructure services market last quarter hit a record US$30.2 billion and is expected to grow 32 percent annually this year, market advisory firm Canalys Co said in a report yesterday.
US technology giants continued to dominate the market, with Amazon.com Inc taking the lead through its cloud-computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which claimed a 32.4 percent market share, the report said.
Microsoft Corp followed with its Azure cloud computing unit for a 17.6 percent market share, while Alphabet Inc’s Google cloud services came in third at 6 percent.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) ranked fourth as its cloud services branch Alibaba Cloud, also known as Aliyun (阿里雲), clinched a 5.4 percent market share.
Total expenditure exceeded US$107 billion last year, jumping from US$78 billion in 2018, the report said, highlighting an unrelenting expansion in the IT industry as companies continued to seek digital transformation.
The growing demand for cloud services is also driving up spending on data center infrastructure, Canalys principal analyst Matthew Ball said in the report as he pointed to an 8 percent annual increase in spending last year by cloud services providers including Alibaba, Amazon, Baidu Inc (百度), Facebook Inc, Google, Microsoft and Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊).
This might come as good news for Taiwan-based server manufacturers, as cloud service providers are the largest buyers of servers worldwide, accounting for more than 35 percent of the overall server market, Canalys said.
Digitimes Research last month forecast a 6 to 7 percent annual increase in sales this year for local server makers, while predicting another 6 to 8 percent growth in server shipments based on market demand driven by companies such as Facebook and Amazon.
Inventec Corp (英業達) and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) were the top two server makers last year in terms of shipments, ahead of Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦) and Wistron Corp (緯創), Digitimes data showed.
Meanwhile, a coronavirus outbreak is sparking fears over production delays as the Chinese government extended a holiday until Monday next week.
However, the server industry is not expected to be strongly affected by the outbreak, Ball said in an e-mail.
“The impact of the US tariffs over the last 12 months has meant vendors and cloud service providers have shifted supply chains to mitigate the additional levies,” Ball said.
RELOCATIONS
Inventec last quarter announced plans to move part of its server production from Shanghai to a plant in Taoyuan’s Gueishan District (龜山). The firm also has server plants in Mexico and the Czech Republic.
Hon Hai last year decided to build a server plant in Kaohsiung’s Hofa Industrial Park (和發產業園區), while its subsidiary Ingrasys Technology Inc (鴻佰科技) is expanding its server plant in Taoyuan, Chinese-language media outlet TechNews reported.
Quanta last year shifted part of its server production back to its plants in New Taipei City’s Linkou District (林口) amid trade tensions between the US and China.
TRADE WAR: Tariffs should also apply to any goods that pass through the new Beijing-funded port in Chancay, Peru, an adviser to US president-elect Donald Trump said A veteran adviser to US president-elect Donald Trump is proposing that the 60 percent tariffs that Trump vowed to impose on Chinese goods also apply to goods from any country that pass through a new port that Beijing has built in Peru. The duties should apply to goods from China or countries in South America that pass through the new deep-water port Chancay, a town 60km north of Lima, said Mauricio Claver-Carone, an adviser to the Trump transition team who served as senior director for the western hemisphere on the White House National Security Council in his first administration. “Any product going
STRUGGLING BUSINESS: South Korea’s biggest company and semiconductor manufacturer’s buyback fuels concerns that it could be missing out on the AI boom Samsung Electronics Co plans to buy back about 10 trillion won (US$7.2 billion) of its own stock over the next year, putting in motion one of the larger shareholder return programs in its history. South Korea’s biggest company would repurchase the stock in stages over the coming 12 months, it said in a regulatory filing on Friday. As a first step, it would buy back about 3 trillion won of paper starting today up until February next year, all of which it would cancel. The board would deliberate on how best to effect the remaining 7 trillion won of buybacks. The move
China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) plans to start mass-producing its most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip in the first quarter of next year, even as it struggles to make enough chips due to US restrictions, two people familiar with the matter said. The telecoms conglomerate has sent samples of the Ascend 910C — its newest chip, meant to rival those made by US chipmaker Nvidia Corp — to some technology firms and started taking orders, the sources told Reuters. The 910C is being made by top Chinese contract chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) on its N+2 process, but a lack
NVIDIA PLATFORM: Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and a Taiwan site is to enter production next month, Nvidia wrote on its blog Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), the world’s biggest electronics manufacturer, yesterday said it is expanding production capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) servers based on Nvidia Corp’s Blackwell chips in Taiwan, the US and Mexico to cope with rising demand. Hon Hai’s new AI-enabled factories are to use Nvidia’s Omnivores platform to create 3D digital twins to plan and simulate automated production lines at a factory in Hsinchu, the company said in a statement. Nvidia’s Omnivores platform is for developing industrial AI simulation applications and helps bring facilities online faster. Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and the
RSS