Microsoft is Nvidia's biggest AI chip buyer of the year, and it's not even close. With ByteDance and Tencent coming out ahead of Zuck, Bezos, and Musk's outfits, too
Yeah, I get it, we already know that Nvidia's sold a motherlode of chips and is laughing its way to the bank. But it hits a little differently to see the actual numbers.
As reported by the Financial Times, the tech consultancy Omdia estimates that Nvidia's biggest purchaser of Hopper chips in 2024 was Microsoft, who bought 485,000 of them, this being over twice as many as any other company. Meta, for example, bought 224,000 of them, Amazon bought 196,000, and Google bought 'just' 169,000.
Surprisingly, though, two of Nvidia's biggest customers were Chinese ones, these being ByteDance (of TikTok fame) and Tencent (of numerous videogames fame). According to Omdia, these each ordered about 230,000 Hopper chips. These won't have been the most powerful ones Nvidia has at its disposal, though, given US-China export restrictions.
In other words, despite export controls, Chinese companies received more Nvidia chips than companies such as Meta, Amazon, and Google this year.
Apart from all the China biz, there are two other things that strike me about these numbers. First, and very simply: Holy moly does Nvidia churn out a lot of a AI chips. Second: Holy moly does Microsoft buya lot of them.
Nvidia's part kind of goes without saying. The company is firmly cemented as the king of the ever-expanding AI infrastructure castle. So much so, in fact, that the company's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, has the chutzpah to claim that «just like we generate electricity, we're now going to be generating AI» in «AI factories».
As far as Microsoft's concerned, while I'm a little surprised to find the company more than doubling the purchases of any other, it also makes sense, especially given the partnership with OpenAI.
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