The DPU/SmartNIC Ethernet market posted very strong growth in 2024, with annual revenues and shipments increasing by nearly 30%, according to a recent report from Crehan Research. Cloud service providers remained the main driver of growth, with just two of these companies, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, accounting for most of the deployments – see accompanying figure. Other cloud providers including Alibaba, CoreWeave, Google, IBM, Oracle and xAI comprised most of the remaining shipments.
“DPU/SmartNIC adoption has, so far, been mostly within companies that rent server capabilities to customers, and has not yet seen broad penetration into markets beyond this,” said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research. “However, we are seeing new innovations, use cases and deployment models such as DPU-enabled Ethernet switches and CPU replacement, which should expand the customer base.”
In correlation with a couple of cloud service providers comprising most of the market’s shipments, Crehan’s report shows that the majority of the DPU/SmartNIC volumes are self-built, as opposed to merchant-built. But Crehan said that is beginning to change. “Self-built DPUs/SmartNICs continue to account for the majority of market revenues and shipments, but we saw much higher growth from the merchant-built segment, as adoption of these products broadens beyond the largest few cloud service providers,” he said.
