What’s Driving China’s Server Market Surge in 2024? Key Insights and Trends

Overview

The 2025 China "Xinchuang" server manufacturer research report shows that total server procurement in China increased from 458.2 billion yuan in 2023 to 505.8 billion yuan in 2024, a growth of 10.4%.

Regional Procurement Distribution

Beijing accounts for the highest procurement amount at 92 billion yuan, far ahead of other regions. Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Liaoning each fall in the 30–40 billion yuan range.

Sector‑Based Procurement Share (2024)

Government, telecom, and financial sectors lead the market, contributing 21%, 9%, and 7% of total procurement respectively.

Key Procurement Priorities

Stability and security are the primary concerns across all industries. Economic factors follow closely, with users emphasizing long‑term ROI, product practicality, system compatibility, and forward‑looking technology that supports smooth upgrades.

CPU Core Requirements

Government workloads are satisfied with CPUs of four cores or more, while other sectors typically demand 8–64 cores, with a majority opting for more than 20 cores per processor.

Architecture Landscape

x86 remains the dominant CPU architecture. Although ARM’s share has risen slightly from 2023 to 2024, it is still far behind x86. Major x86 vendors include HaiGuang (C86) and Zhaoxin, while ARM offerings come from Kunpeng and Phytium.

Market Competition and Ecosystem

Domestic vendors such as Inspur, H3C, Lenovo, and Zhongke KeControl hold notable market shares. HaiGuang’s C86‑based servers offer a complete hardware‑software ecosystem, reducing migration costs. The C86‑4G model has obtained the highest‑level II certification from the China Information Security Evaluation Center.

Performance Highlights of HaiGuang CPUs

Third‑party benchmarks place HaiGuang C867000 at the top of UnixBench multi‑core performance, indicating strong capability for high‑load and concurrent processing scenarios, especially for government core services requiring low latency and high throughput.

Virtualization and Heterogeneous Migration

Software solutions enable x86‑to‑ARM instruction translation, allowing simple applications to run on ARM platforms with acceptable performance loss via virtualization.

Ecosystem Expansion Driven by Negotiation Power

Companies with large data‑center footprints, such as Huawei and Amazon, wield strong bargaining power with software vendors, fostering a robust ecosystem. Over 150 vendors now participate in the Kunpeng computing ecosystem.

Future Trends

With rapid advances in big data, AI, and IoT, servers are poised for a new wave of innovation. Expected trends include higher performance, intelligent management, energy‑efficient (green) designs, and deeper ecosystem integration to power digital transformation.