The key thing that these companies are looking into is energy costs due to the power needed to cool large server farms. Some of the newer data centers that have been built recently pack in tens of thousands of computer servers that generate internet content and cloud services.
According to Kiyomi Yamada, an analyst for Gartner, "Currently, the extremely low-energy server market consists of small providers, such as SeaMicro, now under AMD, and Super Micro. Some major OEMs including HP and Dell have announced that they would enter the market, as well as smaller vendors like Boston Limited."
AMD was a rather surprising addition to the market when it acquired SeaMicro back in February for $334 million. According to a recent report from Gartner, the worldwide server market reached $52.8 billion in 2011. Profit margins, however, were thin, causing vendors to look into branching out to emerging categories like extremely low-energy machines.
Source: Investors.com - HP, Dell, AMD Target Low-Energy Servers, A Hot Market
