"The third quarter of 2017 produced continued growth on a global level with varying regional results," said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. "A build-out of infrastructure to support cloud and hybrid-cloud implementations was the main driver for growth in the server market for the period."

"x86 servers increased 5.3 percent in shipments for the year and 16.7 percent in revenue in the third quarter of 2017. RISC/Itanium Unix servers declined globally, down 23.5 percent in shipments and 18.3 percent in vendor revenue compared with the same quarter last year. The 'other' CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a decline/increase of 54.5 percent," Mr. Hewitt said.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) continued to lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue. Despite a decline of 3.2 percent, the company posted $3.1 billion in revenue for a total share of 21 percent for the third quarter of 2017.

Dell EMC maintained the No. 2 position with 37.9 percent growth and 20.8 percent market share. Inspur Electronics experienced the highest growth in the quarter with 116.6 percent, driven by ongoing sales into China-based cloud providers, as well as global expansion efforts.