Bof A Raises Server CPU Market Forecast, Sees Nearly 5-Fold Growth by 2030
Bank of America raised its forecast for the global server CPU market on Thursday, saying the rise of AI agents is expanding the addressable market for data-center central processing units. Against the backdrop of second-quarter U.S. equity earnings and strong demand for AI computing capacity and memory, BofA analyst Vivek Arya lifted the bank’s forecast for the server CPU market’s total addressable market in 2030 to more than $210 billion, from about $170 billion previously. Compared with a server CPU market of about $35 billion in calendar 2025, BofA expects the market to grow by nearly five times over the next five years. The bank also raised its expected compound annual growth rate to 36% from 30%. The core rationale for the upgrade is a shift in the computing-power balance between CPUs and GPUs. BofA said that in AI-agent inference workloads, CPUs are increasingly becoming the orchestration and control plane. The CPU-to-GPU ratio is moving from about 1:4 in the AI-training era toward roughly 1:1 in the AI-agent era. On that basis, BofA expects CPUs to account for about 10% of the overall $2.2 trillion data-center systems market in 2030, up from its previous estimate of 7%. The bank said the market’s central debate is whether CPUs will replace existing computing capacity or create incremental demand. BofA’s view is that CPUs will add to the total addressable market for data-center systems. BofA also said that GPU rental prices and spot memory prices, both near historical highs, indicate that broad computing-capacity shortages could eventually spread to CPUs. BofA named AMD as its preferred CPU stock, citing the company’s dual advantages in clock speeds and core counts. It named Nvidia as its top pick across the semiconductor sector. The bank also pointed to a potential opportunity in Intel’s foundry business and said Arm remains the vendor gaining market share the fastest.
Against the backdrop of second-quarter U.S. equity earnings and strong demand for AI computing capacity and memory, BofA analyst Vivek Arya lifted the bank’s forecast for the server CPU market’s total addressable market in 2030 to more than $210 billion, from about $170 billion previously.
Compared with a server CPU market of about $35 billion in calendar 2025, BofA expects the market to grow by nearly five times over the next five years. The bank also raised its expected compound annual growth rate to 36% from 30%.
The core rationale for the upgrade is a shift in the computing-power balance between CPUs and GPUs. BofA said that in AI-agent inference workloads, CPUs are increasingly becoming the orchestration and control plane. The CPU-to-GPU ratio is moving from about 1:4 in the AI-training era toward roughly 1:1 in the AI-agent era.
On that basis, BofA expects CPUs to account for about 10% of the overall $2.2 trillion data-center systems market in 2030, up from its previous estimate of 7%.
The bank said the market’s central debate is whether CPUs will replace existing computing capacity or create incremental demand. BofA’s view is that CPUs will add to the total addressable market for data-center systems.
BofA also said that GPU rental prices and spot memory prices, both near historical highs, indicate that broad computing-capacity shortages could eventually spread to CPUs.
BofA named AMD as its preferred CPU stock, citing the company’s dual advantages in clock speeds and core counts. It named Nvidia as its top pick across the semiconductor sector.
The bank also pointed to a potential opportunity in Intel’s foundry business and said Arm remains the vendor gaining market share the fastest.