Ethernet NICs had a strong showing in 2024.
According to Crehan Research, as more data center providers allocated more of their networking capital to Ethernet NICs, the market increased by $2 billion.
Despite one of those years having seen relatively weak performance due to a general market inventory correction, the research firm said the increase reflects a continuation in the trend of substantial investment in server-class Ethernet NICs, which has doubled market revenues in just three years.
"Data Center Ethernet NICs have gone from low-cost commodity chips soldered down on volume server motherboards to high-performance, differentiated, add-in cards that provide a multitude of high-value network functions, including ones formerly handled by CPUs," said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research. "As a result, Ethernet NICs have seen an upward trend in share of data center networking budgets, even as those budgets grew robustly."
Another key trend was the adoption of higher speed NICs.
Crehan saw a strong surge in demand for the highest-speed NICs during the year, with combined 100GbE, 200GbE, and 400GbE NICs increasing more than 50% in shipment and revenues.
While generative AI drove the high-speed Ethernet NIC demand surge, Crehan said, "numerous other areas contributed to the growth, including general cloud compute and storage."
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Sean Buckley
Sean is responsible for establishing and executing the editorial strategies of Lightwave and Broadband Technology Report across their websites, email newsletters, events, and other information products.