Microsoft is probably the most important sales driver for the graphics specialist Nvidia, at least based on the amount of AI chips ordered by the Redmond company. According to market observers, Microsoft alone will have ordered almost 500,000 AI GPUs from Nvidia in 2024. Nvidia
Microsoft is in the middle of an arms race with other technology companies to expand the capacity of its AI data centers as quickly as possible. According to a report by the Financial Times Microsoft has already acquired 485,000 AI processors from Nvidia’s “Hopper” family this year alone. The software company is said to have accounted for around 20 percent of Nvidia’s sales in 2024.
Competitors are also buying AI chips from Nvidia on a gigantic scale. The Facebook parent company Meta Platforms is said to have purchased around 224,000 AI GPUs so far, while Amazon purchased 196,000 units and Google “only” purchased around 169,000 of the chips from the “Hopper” series.
What is surprising about the statistics, which come from the market research company Omdia, is that the Chinese tech companies ByteDance and Tencent were also able to purchase Nvidia’s AI chips on a large scale, reportedly purchasing 230,000 units each this year. It should be borne in mind that the Chinese no longer have the opportunity to purchase the strongest variants because the USA has now restricted exports to China.
In addition to the high-end variants such as the H100 and H200, the “Hopper” family also includes editions such as the older Nvidia H800 and H20, although the latter in particular is still available for Chinese customers due to the reduced AI performance according to the US government’s specifications is accessible.
In addition to Microsoft and its other major competitors, the company xAI, founded by the controversial tech billionaire Elon Musk, is also at the forefront of purchasing Nvidia’s AI GPUs. According to Omdia, xAI, together with Musk’s other cash cow Tesla, is said to have acquired around 200,000 “Hopper” chips in 2024 alone. Incidentally, Microsoft does not use the gigantic quantities of AI GPUs from Nvidia’s production itself, but primarily uses them to equip its Azure data centers, which are also used by the AI leader OpenAI for ChatGPT.
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