PC shipments globally hit 71.5 million units in the fourth quarter of 2025, marking a 9.3% increase from the same period in the previous year, according to Gartner’s preliminary findings. Throughout 2025, worldwide PC shipments surpassed 270 million units, showing a 9.1% rise from 2024. Rishi Padhi, Gartner’s Research Principal, noted that the PC market experienced robust growth in Q4 2025, driven by strong consumer and business demand, particularly due to the Windows 11 upgrade cycle.
Demand slightly eased towards the end of the quarter due to price pressures and promotions countering earlier price hikes on high-end GPUs and AI PCs, leading to stable or slightly reduced average selling prices. The top six vendor rankings globally remained unchanged in the October-December period, with Lenovo, HP, and Dell, the top three vendors, expanding their market shares year-over-year. The PC market saw a resurgence in 2025, achieving a 9.1% growth over 2024, with over 270 million units shipped, marking a significant recovery following declines in 2022 and 2023.
Factors such as tariff uncertainties, expected memory price increases in 2026, and escalating costs linked to Windows 10 Extended Security Updates drove businesses to prioritize hardware replacements. The report also highlighted that vendors emphasized promoting AI PCs to tap into replacement demand. However, despite efforts, many AI PC features like local inference are yet to deliver substantial productivity gains compared to cloud-based AI solutions. Consequently, organizations are upgrading mainly to future-proof their fleets rather than for immediate business value from AI capabilities, as per Padhi.
