According to Mercury Research, Intel's share of the x86 CPU market fell below 70% for the first time since 1995, reaching 69.3% in the second quarter of 2026 — a decline of 6.5 percentage points year over year. Mercury Research president Dean McCarron confirmed the 31-year low to CRN. AMD picked up the difference, reaching a record 30.7% share in the PC-and-server-only figures. When semi-custom, embedded, and IoT products are included, Intel's share drops further to 65.9% against AMD's 34.1%, with AMD benefiting from stronger-than-expected gaming console SoC shipments, a category Intel largely does not compete in.

Broken down by segment, AMD's desktop share rose to 34.9%, up 2.7 points year over year, against Intel's 65.1% — this despite Intel CPUs returning to Amazon's CPU Top 10 sales ranking. In laptops, AMD gained the most ground, climbing 8.4 points year over year to 28.9%, while Intel held 71.1%. AMD's overall PC market share hit a record 30.3%, up 6.4 points year over year. Wccftech separately noted that total desktop PC shipments declined 20% year over year in the quarter.

In servers, Mercury Research's unadjusted figures show AMD growing 7.3 points year over year to 34.5% against Intel's 65.5%. However, Wccftech reported that after normalizing for the fact that AMD does not count embedded CPUs shipped for networking and storage applications in its data center segment while Intel does, AMD's adjusted server share is actually 46.4% versus Intel's 53.6% — figures Wccftech says roughly align with separate data from Jon Peddie Research. The competition in this segment includes AMD's newly launched 6th Gen EPYC 'Venice' server processors built on the 'Zen 6' architecture, against Intel's upcoming Xeon 7 'Diamond Rapids' CPUs and its 'Crescent Island' graphics card for data centers and workstations.

Intel, when asked to comment, pointed to record year-over-year sales growth in its Data Center Group and a growing number of long-term supply agreements. Wccftech reported that Intel's data center revenue was up 59% year over year in the quarter. A U.S. systems integrator executive told CRN that Intel's partner engagement has picked up noticeably after a period when AMD was drawing more attention, saying, "I think they're realizing that they have to be active."

Wccftech also noted that Intel's 14A manufacturing node is set to begin risk production in 2027, and that the company has expressed confidence in significantly raising capital expenditure next year, which it says reflects visibility into confirmed customer orders.