"Consistent execution by our sales teams and partners drove a strong start to the fiscal year with Microsoft Cloud revenue of $31.8 billion, up 24% (up 23% in constant currency) year-over-year," said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft.

Google has reached a key milestone in designing server processors aimed at reducing the cost of operating its data centers and keeping up with cloud business rival Amazon, according to one person with direct knowledge of the project and one person who was briefed about it. The progress means Google could start using the new chips by 2025, one of these people said.

Texas Instruments (TI) has announced its gallium nitride (GaN) technology and C2000 real-time microcontrollers (MCUs) are being combined with Delta Electronics' high-efficiency power electronics expertise in the design of an enterprise server power-supply unit (PSU) for datacenter applications.

Advanced Micro Devices gave a bullish third-quarter sales forecast, indicating it's gaining market share from Intel in the lucrative market for server chips.

Exclusive: License to bypass ban brightens outlook for delayed IPO

A lifeline for the beleaguered facility

The latest version of Nvidia's flagship A100 server GPU packs twice as much high-speed memory as its predecessor.

SK Hynix, the world's No.2 memory chip maker, said it expected inventory build-up by Huawei's competitors in China to boost mobile demand in the current quarter, but its mainstay server demand would remain week.

Ship the chips

Intel has stopped supplying its products to Inspur, China's largest maker of computer servers.

PureLocker ransomware appears to have links to some of the most prolific cyber-criminal operations active in the world today.

Advanced Micro Devices on Wednesday released the second generation of its processor chip for data centers and said that it had landed Google and Twitter as customers.

Huawei will invest 3 billion yuan (about 436 million U.S. dollars) in the next 5 years to develop an ecosystem for its ARM-based server chips and complementary products, China Daily reported Wednesday.

A joint venture between Qualcomm and the government of a rural Chinese province to make server chips will wind down by the end of April, according to 10 employees at the venture.

Chinese giant spruiks higher performance with lower power consumption in its own tests.

Amazon's cloud business is coming out with cheaper computing options, thanks to server chips that use the energy-efficient Arm processing architecture.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is poised to secure a crucial order from IBM for premium server chips, validating the company as a serious challenger to global chipmaker Intel in the high-value data center market.

There are so many ironies in the hardware business that it is amazing that we aren't covered in rust. One irony is that after decades of socket compression in the datacenter, the time of the single socket server may have returned. And if it does, it will be largely AMD's doing with the Epyc line of X86 chips, which were created to give no-holds-barred performance sufficient to knock out a slew of two socket Xeon machinery in the datacenter.

Thanks to a licensing deal with AMD and a complex joint-venture arrangement, the Chinese chip producer Chengdu Haiguang IC Design (Hygon) is now producing x86-based server processors that are largely indistinguishable from AMD's EPYC processors - so close in design that Linux kernel developers had to do little in the way of patching to support the new processor family, called "Dhyana." The server chips are being manufactured for domestic use only - part of an effort to break China's dependence on foreign technology companies.

Qualcomm is preparing to give up its push to develop processors for data-center servers, an effort that sought to break Intel's hold on the lucrative market, according to a person familiar with the company's plans.

Globalfoundries is now delivering in volume its 14nm High Performance (HP) technology that will enable IBM's next-generation of processors for server systems.

Microsoft is committing to use chips based on ARM Holdings technology in the machines that run its cloud services, potentially imperiling Intel's longtime dominance in the profitable market for data-center processors.

The agreement covers the use of Rambus patented memory solutions, including server DIMM chipsets, for Winbond products through 2021.

After more than half a decade in the making, ARM server chips should have struck gold by now, but they haven't. ARM servers were projected to be approaching a double-digit server market share, but they still are virtually non-existent.

The chip, called Piton, would "substantially increase processing speed while slashing energy usage."

Few companies enjoy the kind of dominance Intel does in chips for the computers found in data centers. But competitors keep trying to pry open its server stronghold, with IBM the latest to brandish a new tool.

Qualcomm's second-quarter results show the chipmaker is overcoming hurdles in China, while rival Intel faces fresh headwinds in servers -- the key to its profit.

I don't expect Intel to roll out server chips built on the company's 10nm technology to roll out in 2017; Intel is expected to introduce its second-generation 14nm server chip family in early to mid-2017. However, if Intel can get the process ramped at high yields during the second half of 2017 with PC-targeted products, it should bode well for a launch of 10nm server processors in the first half of 2018.

Qualcomm is poised to get a crucial stamp of approval for its fledgling push into server chips, a market dominated by Intel.

Qualcomm has revealed its plans to enter the server CPU market with a custom processor based on a design from UK chip company ARM.

Applied Micro Circuits recently appointed hedge fund manager Christopher Zepf as one of its board of directors, which has led many to believe that perhaps the company might soon present itself for sale.

In the data center, where Intel has handily trounced AMD in sales of server microprocessors, there is still a need for x86-compatible chips, of which AMD holds the only cards outside Intel. That could make AMD a target in the data center for Xilinx or for Chinese state-owned investment vehicles.