IT Hardware: The Enterprise Compute Shortage - Pull-Forward or Paradigm Shift?

Research evidence excerpt

IT Hardware: The Enterprise Compute Shortage - Pull-Forward or Paradigm Shift?

IdeaM

Updating Our Latest Server Market Thoughts

What is Happening In The Enterprise Server Market?

Market View: The market broadly agrees that enterprise server demand is

stronger than expected just a few months ago, and that some portion of current

strength reflects pull-forward activity as customers accelerate purchases ahead of

component shortages, price increases, and longer lead times. However, the market

increasingly believes that agentic AI, AI inferencing, and broader AI infrastructure

deployments are creating a new demand vector for traditional enterprise OEM

servers, supporting a stronger-for-longer server cycle and pushing the eventual

digestion phase further into the future.

Morgan Stanley View: Enterprise server demand is benefiting from a unique

combination of refresh activity, supply-constrained pull-forward, infrastructure

modernization, and elevated prioritization of compute spending - all at materially

higher prices - leading us to raise our CY26-CY27 forecasts for DELL, HPE, SNX,

INGM, IBM and CDW (and the Server market as a whole). We believe that Agentic

AI and new AI inferencing workloads going into production are likely to contribute

to the fastest server replacement cycles in years, but also we remain skeptical that

enterprise server demand is going through a material secular inflection point due

to these new workloads. Said differently, the confluence of factors listed above,

combined with supply shortages, are likely to drive upside to the Server market

TAM and enterprise-server exposed company estimates in 2026 and 2027, but

visibility beyond this timeframe is limited, and therefore the duration of this cycle