Inside Mozilla's new data center in Santa Clara, California – about an hour south of San Francisco – the machine was sitting against the wall, all by itself.

It was a new kind of computer server – a machine packed with dozens of tiny of chips originally built for cellphones – and though it promised to reinvent the way the world runs web services, reducing both the space and the electricity needed inside the modern data center, Mozilla was unimpressed. At the organization that oversees the popular Firefox web browser, engineers had unplugged the machine from the network and left it collecting dust.

This was May 2012, and that lonely machine was a server built by a Silicon Valley startup called SeaMicro. At the time, SeaMicro was at the forefront of a movement to reimagine the computer server, and its initial design – based on ultra-low-power Intel Atom chips – had fallen a little flat. As it turned out, the Intel chips and similar cellphone processors just weren't powerful enough to run a major website, no matter how many you packed into a machine.

But the crusade was only just getting started. A year and a half on, SeaMicro is a key part of big-name chip maker AMD, and its new-fangled machines underpin a sweeping new cloud service from US telecom giant Verizon, filling space in seven data centers across the globe. "One of the largest carriers on earth is building a new type of cloud," says Andrew Feldman, the founder of SeaMicro who now serves as a general manager and corporate vice president at AMD, "and it's doing this with our infrastructure."

According to Feldman, the company's machines also underpin cloud services run by NTT Docomo, the massive Japanese telecom, and they're under test at other unnamed companies in Europe.

These machines don't use "cellphone-class" chips, but each includes dozens of more powerful processors that juggle data in ways traditional machines can't, and one day, SeaMicro will continue to improve the efficiency of these machines with a new breed of low-power processor.

SeaMicro's progress is yet another sign that the server market is changing – in big ways. Companies such as Google and Amazon and Facebook are going straight to manufacturers in Asia for custom-designed machines, and with these web giants as an influence, hardware makers such as SeaMicro are building a new kind of machine of the rest of the world. This evolution takes time, but it's happening, and in the years to come, we'll see a move towards ARM processors and other ultra-low-power chips that have long threatened to overturn the server game.

Though the SeaMicro servers use ordinary server chips, they still offer something very different: a "server fabric" designed by SeaMicro and its chief technology officer Gary Lauterbach. Basically, this is a way of facilitating communication between chips, a series of electrical connections that tie all those processors together. The fabric is what allows SeaMicro to pack dozens of chips into a single machine, but it also means that data flows between the processors more efficiently, and SeaMicro has now extended this fabric to the many hard disks and flash drives that store data on behalf of these machines.

As Feldman explains, the fabric insures that any processor can talk directly to any disk in the system, and if different users are running software on the same processor, data traffic for one user can move in and out of the chip independently of traffic for the other. "That lets you honor a performance guarantee to the user," he says. "It lets you control the traffic so that performance is high – and perfectly predictable."

According to John Considine, the Verizon chief technology officer that oversaw the design of the telecom's new cloud service, the SeaMicro machines allow Verizon to guarantee a given level of performance for each individual user of the service. With Amazon Web Services and other popular cloud services, users share access to a large pool of servers, and applications run by one user can bog down applications run by another. Considine says the SeaMicro machines – thanks to that server fabric – solve this problem.

"We were looking for something that would give us more inter-connectivity between components in the data center," he explains. "[The server fabric] gives us the freedom to manage the connectivity and the performance in the system, while at the same time boosting the reliability."

Considine says that Verizon has been working with SeaMicro for over two years on its new service, and that should show you just how long the gestation period is for this sort of computer hardware. Servers are evolving more quickly than ever before, but new designs still take time to reach fruition. "Hardware takes a long time," says Feldman. "This is just the way hardware gets built and rolled out and deployed. It takes a long time to get it right – and get big customers on-board."

For SeaMicro and AMD, the next step is to build servers around ARM chips, the type of processors that run most of today's cellphones and tablet PCs. AMD has licensed the ARM architecture, and the aim is to fashion ultra-low-power processors specifically suited to the heavy workloads handled by servers inside an internet data center. This may take a while. But it'll happen.

Additional reporting by Robert McMillan