A graph with the companies that have purchased the most NVIDIA chips makes it clear who rules the artificial intelligence market
The most desired piece of computing hardware in the world right now isn’t an iPhone or a Galaxy Z Fold 5. It’s an NVIDIA GPU called H100, the brain of the most powerful artificial intelligence that exists.
An H100 GPU costs between 30,000 and 40,000 euros, and despite this you have to enter a one-year waiting list to get it. For NVIDIA they are the goose that lays the golden eggs: earn 1,000% with each card. It is not surprising that the company is already worth a billion dollars on the stock market.
If you want to offer a quality artificial intelligence service to many clients, you need thousands of these graphics cards. NVIDIA has sold 500,000 AI GPUs only in the third quarter of 2023, adding the A100 and H100 models. But who?
Who buys the most artificial intelligence GPUs in the world
These graphics cards are specialized in making billions of calculations per second for artificial intelligence: they help it make decisions, perform calculations, and extract or locate information. Definitely, They are the brain of AI.
The more powerful the AI chips are, the faster and more effective the AI software that uses them will be, be it ChatGPT, Bard, Llama, etc. And, so far, there is no GPU more powerful in AI than the NVIDIA H100.
The equation is simple: The more H100 GPU it has, the more powerful and faster its AI will be, and therefore it will dominate the market.
This chart, designed by Omdia Research, makes a lot of things clear. It shows us the estimated H100 chips to have been sold throughout 2023. And there are two clear winners:
As we see, Meta and Microsoft are the companies that have purchased the most H100 chipssurpassed 150,000 units. They triple the quantity of Google, Amazon, Oracle and Tencent, which remain at 50,000 units.
The Chinese company Tencent will not be able to repeat in 2024, due to sanctions on China that prevent NVIDIA from selling AI chips to companies in the country. The same goes for Baidu and Alibaba, which bought 30,000 and 25,000 units, respectively.
At the end of the list we have Spotify with 20,000 units, and Tesla with 15,000. Just as Elon Musk said a few days ago: “Buying AI GPUs is harder than buying drugs”…
It is surprising that Apple is not on the list, a company that seems not too interested in competing in this market. A decision that could be very expensive in the future. Or maybe it’s just using other chips, although there isn’t much else outside of NVIDIA, for now.
The 150,000 units of H100 GPUs acquired by Meta and Microsoft make it clear who is in charge right now in the artificial intelligence market. They are the companies that are investing the most in creating software with AI for their services, and they need this hardware so they can function.
