Hewlett-Packard on Monday launched a Moonshot system that uses smartphone-style chips to power compact, efficient data center servers.

The California-based computer maker said Moonshot systems take up a fifth of the space of traditional computer servers and can cut energy use by as much as 89 percent while costing about 77 percent less to buy.

"With nearly 10 billion devices connected to the Internet and predictions for exponential growth, we've reached a point where the space, power and cost demands of traditional technology are no longer sustainable," HP chief Meg Whitman said in a release.

"HP Moonshot marks the beginning of a new style of IT that will change the infrastructure economics and lay the foundation for the next 20 billion devices."

The new class of computer server is billed as being able to handle the challenges created by social networking, cloud computing, and gathering and analyzing massive amounts of data.

Moonshot servers are powered by Intel Atom chips more commonly found in smartphones and tablets. The servers were made available Monday in the United States and Canada and will be released elsewhere in May.

HP is in the middle of a massive shift in strategy as consumers gravitate from traditional PCs to mobile devices, including tablets.

Whitman, who is spearheading the move, has said the company -- still the world's biggest PC maker -- is making progress but that more work is needed.