Chinese cloud giants bought more of Nvidia’s flagship AI chips than anyone else – except Microsoft
- Microsoft bought almost half a million Nvidia’s flagship Hopper chips in 2024
- TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and Tencent bought almost as much
- This is more than Meta, Tesla/xAI, Amazon and Google
Chinese cloud giants Tencent and TikTok’s parent company ByteDance were the top buyers of Nvidia’s flagship AI chips in 2024, coming in second after Microsoft, according to a report by Omdia and analysis of the Financial times.
The two Chinese companies each ordered about 230,000 Nvidia’s Hopper GPUs, including the H20 model developed to meet strict U.S. export restrictions to China.
The report shows that Microsoft purchased 485,000 Hopper chips in 2024, far ahead of its competitors.
Chinese influence
“Good data center infrastructure, they are very complex, capital-intensive projects,” Alistair Speirs, senior director of Azure Global Infrastructure at Microsoft, told the Financial times. “They require several years of planning. And so it’s important to predict where our growth will be, with a little bit of a buffer.”
In contrast, Meta purchased 224,000 Hopper GPUs in 2024, followed by Amazon and Google with 196,000 and 169,000 units, respectively. All three tech giants are increasingly moving away from dependence on Nvidia hardware by developing their own in-house custom silicon. The FT says Google deployed 1.5 million TPUs, Meta 1.5 million MTIA chips and Amazon 1.3 million Trainium and Inferentia chips, while Microsoft, still in its early stages, installed around 200,000 Maia chips.
According to Omdia, Nvidia will capture 43 percent of server hardware spending by 2024, but AMD also performed strongly, with Microsoft buying 96,000 of its Instinct MI300 chips and Meta 173,000.
While Microsoft comfortably leads the pack in GPU acquisitions, ByteDance and Tencent’s substantial investments reflect Chinese companies’ determination to secure a strong position in the AI race – a momentum expected to continue into 2025.
By outspending Google, Meta, Tesla/xAI and Amazon in units purchased, the two Chinese companies have shown that they can compete with the largest of the US tech giants, despite the significant challenges posed by the ongoing trade restrictions coming to is expected to increase even further. under the Trump administration.