TECH NEWS – By 2027, we could see a very large increase in sales of AI-enabled PCs, driven by generative or content-generating AI, according to Counterpoint Research.

PCs have been used as the primary productivity device for several decades, but now we are entering a new era of PCs based on artificial intelligence, thanks to the boom in generative AI (GenAI). Counterpoint Research believes that the inventory correction and weak demand in the global PC market have already normalized, with the impact of the pandemic largely priced in. All of this has created a comparatively healthy backdrop for the transformation of the PC industry. Counterpoint estimates that nearly half a billion AI laptops will be sold between 2023 and 2027, with AI PCs driving replacement demand.

Counterpoint divides GenAI laptops into three categories (AI basic, AI advanced, AI capable laptop) based on different levels of computing power, corresponding use cases, and efficiency of computing power. They believe that AI basic laptops, which are already in the market, can perform basic AI tasks but not full GenAI tasks, and will be replaced starting this year by more AI advanced and AI capable models with enough TOPS (tera operations per second) powered by NPU (neural processing unit) or GPU (graphics processing unit) to perform the advanced GenAI tasks well.

“Counterpoint predicts that the penetration of AI-enabled laptops, which will make up the majority of the AI laptop PC segment, will accelerate over the next two years as chip vendors bring GenAI capability to mainstream tiers. With the proliferation of GenAI use cases at the edge, in the cloud, or in a hybrid fashion over the next few years, GenAI will become a de facto and must-have capability in the PC segment. Building the right tools and ecosystem will be critical to this adoption. Players like Qualcomm have already accelerated developer evangelism with partners like Microsoft, Hugging Face, and a set of advanced AI stack toolsets.

While the overall laptop PC market will register ~3% CAGR during 2023-2027, the AI laptop PC segment will grow at 59% CAGR. The advanced semiconductor content, from compute to memory, will drive positive ASP (average selling price) growth associated with newer GenAI capabilities, translating into more value for consumers than before. In addition, we estimate that AI laptop PCs capable of running advanced GenAI applications will account for three out of every four laptop PCs sold in 2027,” wrote Senior Analyst William Li.

Generative AI computing initially relies on the cloud. It requires more computing capacity and performance from model training to millions of queries per second, but this is not sustainable from any perspective, which is why increasing the rate of local processing will be important, but also better work efficiency, data protection and security will become important…

Source: WCCFTech, Counterpoint Research