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IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker shows the external OEM enterprise storage systems (ESS) market reached $10.3 billion in vendor revenue during the second quarter of 2026, up 33.6% year over year. It’s the second-highest quarterly total in the tracker’s history, trailing only Q4 2025, and the highest revenue ever recorded outside a fourth-quarter period. Growth accelerated from the 28.7% rate posted in Q1 2026, marking a second consecutive quarter of acceleration after full-year 2025 growth came in at just 3.9%. IDC’s server tracker for the same quarter tells a bigger version of the same story: a record $166.3 billion in server revenue, up 52.0%, with Dell Technologies on top of both lists. What’s Driving the Storage Surge IDC points to three reinforcing dynamics. Buyers appear to be pulling storage purchases forward to lock in budgets and configurations ahead of anticipated component price increases. Component price increases have hit all segments, including all-flash, hybrid, and HDD-only systems, pushing system prices up and leaving customers buying less capacity for more money. On top of that, the multi-year infrastructure refresh cycle that got deferred while server and AI compute spending took priority in 2024 and 2025 is now flowing through in force, especially at the high end. The root cause, per IDC, is a component supply shortage: NAND and DRAM production capacity keeps getting prioritized for higher-margin memory products, which hits SSD pricing hard. IDC doesn’t expect meaningful relief before 2028. Q2 2026 Storage Tracker Highlights All-flash arrays (AFA) extended their lead, generating $5.4 billion (+42.9% YoY) for 52.1% of total ESS revenue. Hybrid flash arrays (HFA) grew 25.5% YoY to $3.9 billion (37.5% share), while all-HDD arrays grew 22.6% to $1.1 billion (10.4% share). High-end systems priced above $250K ASP surged 90.6% YoY to $2.7 billion, now 26.2% of the market, driven by large-scale AI infrastructure storage deployments, and accelerating from 60.7% growth in Q1. Midrange systems ($25K to $250K) grew 28.2% to $6.7 billion (64.8% share), while entry systems under $25K declined 14.6% to $0.9 billion. First-half 2026 revenue reached $29.6 billion, up 28.2% YoY, eight times the 3.9% growth rate recorded for all of 2025. Canada (+77.2% YoY), APeJC (+73.1%), and Central & Eastern Europe (+54.1%) posted the fastest regional growth, while the US remained the largest market at $3.6 billion (+26.8% YoY, 35.3% share). Western Europe was second at $1.9 billion (+42.8%), followed by PRC at $2.2 billion (+20.7%). All nine tracked regions grew, with Japan the slowest at +12.9% YoY. Storage Vendor Standings Dell Technologies held the top spot with a 23.8% share and 42.5% YoY growth, extending the share gains it posted in Q1 2026, which we covered in our prior quarterly storage tracker analysis; IDC credits Dell’s broad portfolio and its AI storage attach strategy, the same lineup we looked at in our PowerStore Gen 3 coverage. Huawei moved into second with an 11.3% share, up 29.4% YoY. NetApp held third at a 9.6% share and 35.7% growth, backed by its expanding all-flash business. Everpure placed fourth with an 8.1% share but posted the fastest growth among the top five at +50.0% YoY, which IDC attributes to continued adoption of its subscription model and AI-optimized platforms. Hewlett Packard Enterprise rounded out the top five with a 6.8% share and 31.9% growth. Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, September 10, 2026. Vendor revenue in US$ millions. “Over the past two years, storage has taken a back seat to compute. Enterprises poured their budgets into accelerated server infrastructure to get AI training off the ground, and storage spending grew at a fraction of that pace. That balance is shifting,” said Natalya Yezhkova, vice president, Storage and Data Management, Enterprise Infrastructure, IDC. “As AI moves from training to inferencing, the bottleneck isn’t just computing resources anymore, it’s how quickly and broadly organizations can put their data estates to work. At the same time, storage systems are getting more expensive, and few customers have the luxury of waiting out the price cycle: the data must be accessible now.” Yezhkova added that IDC expects component costs to stay elevated well into 2027, keeping pricing-driven growth in place alongside underlying demand from unstructured data growth, inferencing workloads, and the deferred refresh cycle. Server Market Sets a Record IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker shows the worldwide server market reached $166.3 billion in vendor revenue in Q2 2026, the highest quarterly total in the tracker’s history, surpassing the previous record of $125.3 billion set in Q4 2025. That’s a 52.0% YoY increase and a 35.7% sequential gain. AI infrastructure investment remained the dominant driver, with this quarter’s gain reflecting both a resumption of unit-shipment growth and continued ASP increases across accelerated and non-accelerated systems. It follows the Q3 2025 record we reported last December and the Q4 2025 high that replaced it. Non-x86 servers reached $74.4 billion, up 146.0% YoY, now 44.8% of total market revenue and closing in on x86’s share. x86 server revenue reached $91.9 billion, up 16.1% YoY. GPU-accelerated servers generated $87.4 billion (+28.1% YoY), 52.6% of total market revenue, while “Other Accelerated” servers surged 237.6% YoY to $27.5 billion. Worldwide unit shipments grew 15.4% YoY alongside 52.0% revenue growth, which IDC says confirms that this quarter’s growth came from both a resumption of shipment volume and continued ASP increases. Pricing is where IDC spends the most ink. Average selling prices for GPU-accelerated servers rose from roughly $118,600 to nearly $170,200, up 43.6% YoY, even as GPU server unit shipments fell 10.8% year over year. Non-accelerated servers climbed from roughly $9,800 to nearly $13,000 (+33.5% YoY) alongside a 16.7% increase in units, so that segment is growing on both price and volume. ODM Direct revenue share compressed from 60.6% in Q2 2025 to 53.9% in Q2 2026 as branded OEM vendors captured a larger share of AI infrastructure deployments, even as ODM Direct revenue grew 35.2% YoY. Vendors continue to cite DRAM and NAND flash pricing, along with component allocation, as the primary drivers of ASP increases. IDC says buyers are securing components and finished systems further in advance to guard against price inflation and allocation risk, and notes that deployment pace is increasingly gated by power availability, cooling, and facility readiness in addition to chip and memory supply. Server Regional and Vendor Standings The US remained the dominant server market, at $112.2 billion (+54.9% YoY), accounting for 67.4% of global revenue. PRC reached $26.4 billion (+43.4% YoY), reaccelerating from recent quarters. APeJC grew 31.5% to $10.9 billion, Western Europe grew 62.7% to $9.1 billion, and Central & Eastern Europe grew 98.3% to $0.7 billion off a small base. Canada was again the fastest-growing region worldwide at +202.6% YoY, followed by the Middle East & Africa (+68.8%) and Latin America (+32.8%). Japan grew 11.1% YoY. Dell Technologies retained the top vendor position with a 13.4% revenue share and 165.4% YoY growth, the fastest among the top five, which IDC attributes to continued record AI server orders. Supermicro held second with a 6.1% share, up 97.2% YoY. Lenovo retained third with a 5.1% share and 99.6% growth. Hewlett Packard Enterprise ranked fourth with a 3.5% share (+46.0% YoY), and IEIT Systems rounded out the top five with a 2.4% share (-8.1% YoY). ODM Direct held its dominant absolute position at $89.7 billion, up 35.2% YoY, though its share continued to compress as branded OEM vendors grew faster. Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, September 10, 2026. Vendor revenue in US$ millions. “The notable shift in the server market this quarter is in who is now buying,” said Kuba Stolarski, research vice president, IDC’s Computing Platforms and Service Provider Infrastructure. “Demand is broadening beyond the largest hyperscalers toward specialized cloud providers (or neoclouds) scaling quickly, sovereign AI programs backed by public capital, and enterprises beginning to adopt agentic and inferencing workloads. Each affects the market differently: neoclouds add scale, sovereign programs add spending that is less exposed to commercial budget cycles, and enterprise adoption adds longer-run upside as inference and agentic workloads move into production. With demand increasingly committed well in advance, what will separate vendors is who can convert that demand into sales, as power and facility readiness become as binding as component supply.”
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