The analyst company Canalys has forecasted that AI-capable PCs will make up 40% of PC shipments in 2025, up from 18% in 2024. There are expected to be 48 million shipments this year, and, in 2025, the figure could go past 100 million.
Another prediction that Canalys has made is that in 2028, there could be 205 million AI-capable PCs shipped. This would represent a “staggering” compound annual growth rate of 44% between 2024 and 2028.
When talking about AI-capable PCs, Canalys is referring to computers with dedicated AI accelerators like Neural Processing Units (NPUs), which are capable of performing AI workloads on-device instead of relying on the cloud.
Providing comment, Ishan Dutt, Principal Analyst at Canalys, said:
“The wider availability of AI-accelerating silicon in personal computing will be transformative, leading to over 150 million AI-capable PCs shipping through to the end of 2025. PCs with dedicated on-device AI capabilities will enable new and improved user experiences, driving productivity gains and personalizing devices at scale while offering better power efficiency, stronger security and reduced costs associated with running AI workloads. This emerging PC category opens new frontiers for both software developers and hardware vendors to innovate and deliver compelling use cases to customers across consumer, commercial and education scenarios.”
These AI-capable PCs are expected to include a 10-15% price premium. By the end of 2025, more than half of PCs priced at $800 or more will ship with these AI features. This share will increase to more than 80% by 2028.
It’s still early days for on-board AI functionality but we can imagine that these chips could be leveraged to summarize documents, recognize text on screenshots, help generate images, and more. Having AI capabilities could be something that customers look out for next to other considerations such as RAM and disk space.
Source: Canalys