AI PCs Account For 14% Of Total PC Shipments: 8.8 Million Units Sold In Q2 2024

Worldwide PC shipments saw a whopping 8.8 million AI PC sales in Q2 alone, doubling the sales compared to the first quarter.

With the booming AI demand, AI-oriented hardware shipments are on the rise. PC hardware manufacturers are now focusing on developing specific hardware for AI applications to handle machine learning algorithms. Major chipmakers such as Intel, AMD & Qualcomm have added significantly faster NPU hardware into their latest SOCs to make sure that they are MS Copilot+ certified.

The drastic change in the hardware market can be seen from the PC sales, which just doubled in the second quarter of 2024. According to the market research agency, Canalys, about 8.8 million AI PCs were shipped globally in the second quarter.

This is twice as many AI-boosted systems that were shipped in the first quarter this year. AI PC accounted for 14% of the total PC shipments in the second quarter, marking a major shift in the tech landscape. Partners working on these next-generation products are also showing heightened optimism with demand going up.

Compared to this recent stat, AI systems had only 7% of total sales in the first quarter. AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and other major hardware manufacturers have put their focus and efforts into the latest-gen chips and it is expected that the sales of AI PCs will increase in the upcoming quarters as well.

The Principal Analyst at Canalys, Ishan Dutt said, "The quarter added significant momentum to the expansion of AI PCs." He cites Qualcomm's Snapdragon X-series chips for AI PCs, AMD's Ryzen AI 300 series of mobile processors, and Intel's Core Ultra chipset as one of the major reasons for the boost in sales. However, it looks like Apple is taking over the Windows-based AI PCs since MacOS accounts for almost 60% of the total share in Q2.

Windows comes in second place with 39% of the total share and ChromeOS takes the third place with just 1% share. Nonetheless, Windows AI PCs costing above US$800 saw two times higher share in the second quarter and the shipments increased by 127% month-over-month. Lenovo, HP, and Dell were the major brands for selling the highest number of Windows-based systems with 6%, 8%, and 7% shares respectively.

This year we saw the launch of Lenovo's Yoga  Slim 7x and ThinkPad T14s with Snapdragon X-series processors while HP and Dell went with the latest Core Ultra processors for their lineups. According to Ishan, PC OEMs played a major role in the growth of AI PCs in the market, which is also evident from the fact that PC manufacturers are launching AI processors-equipped new laptops and mini-PCs very often. Expect more products to launch throughout 2024, especially during the upcoming back-to-school and the holiday season which is just a few months away.