The HPC Cloud Market by Geographic Region and Competitive Segment

Hyperion Research has followed the growth of accelerators in HPC for more than 10 years. Accelerators had an initially slow HPC adoption curve but have recently experienced amplified growth. Within the HPC accelerator market, GPUs, particularly those from Nvidia, have dominated. Although originally designed as gaming processors for graphics rendering, GPUs were found to be well suited to a range of HPC applications, plus critical underlying AI functions, such as matrix multiplication, driving impressive performance gains. As a result, many HPC sites across a broad range of verticals are now using accelerators to speed up a larger portion of their increasingly AI-based workloads.

Although China represents more than one-third of the global market for semiconductors, the country relies heavily on foreign sources, especially U.S. chipmakers and foundries headquartered in other Asian countries, for a majority of devices critical to Chinese-made products ranging from smartphones to industrial machinery and supercomputers. For the past few decades, China sought to develop an indigenous capability in an effort to reduce its dependence on the foreign supply of components. Its most recent major effort, the “Made-in-China” semiconductor initiative launched in 2015, targeted supplying 40% of China's semiconductor demand with homegrown products by 2020 and 70% by 2025.