Data Center Hardware in 2025: What’s Changing and Why It Matters

Data center hardware often operates behind the scenes, quietly powering the critical systems that define modern computing. While it may not grab headlines like AI breakthroughs or green energy initiatives, the hardware landscape is evolving rapidly, with innovations today reshaping how data centers function tomorrow.

From cutting-edge chip architectures to advanced storage solutions and intelligent management techniques, hardware trends play a pivotal role in driving efficiency and performance.

Let’s explore five key data center hardware issues set to shape the industry in 2025.

1. Investment in AI Accelerator Hardware

As you probably know if you’ve paid any attention to AI’s impact on data centers over the past several years, many AI workloads perform best when they run on specialized AI accelerator hardware.

For that reason, one of the most significant data center hardware trends at present is investment in AI accelerators.

Personally, I believe demand for AI-friendly hardware in data centers will ultimately prove limited, especially once AI technology matures and businesses are no longer constantly launching AI experiments or proof-of-concept projects. But there’s still no denying that AI accelerators are poised to account for an increasingly large share of data center hardware in 2025.

Related:Demand for Google’s TPU Chips ‘Challenges NVIDIA’s Dominance’

2. Growing Deployment of DPUs

Alongside hardware devices designed specifically for AI, 2025 will witness growing investment in other types of hardware optimizations for data centers, such as Data Processing Units (DPUs).

DPUs can handle tasks like network traffic management, which would otherwise fall to CPUs. In this way, DPUs reduce the load placed on CPUs, ultimately making greater computing capacity available to applications.

DPUs have been around for several years, but they’ve become particularly important as a way of boosting the performance of resource-hungry workloads, like AI training, by completing AI accelerators. (To be clear, DPUs are not a type of AI accelerator, but they can be used alongside AI accelerators to make servers more effective at handling compute-intensive tasks.) This is why I think DPUs are about to have their moment.

The evolution of data center hardware is key to meeting the demands of AI, sustainability, and advanced security in 2025 (Image: Alamy)

3. Expanded Use of Advanced Hardware Cooling Technologies

Data center hardware produces a lot of heat. In the typical data center, the strategy for dissipating that heat hasn’t changed much in decades. It involves blowing air over servers.

But there are other methods – including direct-to-chip and liquid immersion cooling. These approaches are much more energy efficient. They may also increase hardware lifetime by reducing overheating events.

Related:White Box Switches: Benefits and Best Use Cases for Data Centers

Historically, the use of more sophisticated data center cooling techniques was limited, due especially to the high cost of installing advanced cooling systems. But as AI and heat waves pose ever-greater cooling challenges, advanced hardware cooling solutions are likely to become more appealing to data center operators in 2025 and beyond.

4. Focus on Hardware Security Risks

Recent events have underscored the risk of security threats linked to physical hardware devices. And while I doubt anyone is currently plotting to blow up data centers by placing secret bombs inside servers, I do suspect there are threat actors out there vying to do things like plant malicious firmware on servers as a way of creating backdoors that they can use to hack into data centers.

For this reason, I think we’ll see an increased focus in 2025 on validating the origins of data center hardware and ensuring that no unauthorized parties had access to equipment during the manufacturing and shipping processes. Traditional security controls will remain important, too, but I’m betting on hardware security becoming a more intense area of concern in the year ahead.

Read more of the latest data center hardware news

Related:Power, Heat, and Sustainability: Five Forces Redefining Data Center Cooling in 2025

5. Growing Interest in Arm Servers in Data Centers

I’ll end my list of 2025 data center hardware trends with a prediction that may well prove to be wrong but is plausible: 2025 may be the year when Arm servers finally become common in data centers.

Arm servers are servers whose computer chips use the Arm architecture instead of x86, which has historically been the chip design used by virtually every server. Arm architectures offer the potential for a variety of benefits, including better energy efficiency.

There has long been talk of deploying Arm chips more widely in data centers. To date, that hasn’t happened. But there’s decent reason to believe it may in 2025, particularly due to intensifying concerns about the energy consumption of data centers in the AI era. Theoretically, Arm servers could increase the energy efficiency of data centers, including but not limited to those that host AI workloads.

On balance, I wouldn’t bet much money that 2025 will become the Year of the Arm Server, largely because migrating to Arm would require more changes to software than most organizations are prepared to make. But to quote the McDonald’s advertisements of my youth, “hey, it could happen.”