Chinese cloud giants bought more of Nvidia’s flagship AI chips than anybody else – except Microsoft

LovabledanielsDecember 31, 2024139 Views

Microsoft purchased nearly half a million of 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 major buyers of Nvidia’s flagship AI chips in 2024, coming second only to Microsoft, according to a report from Omdia and analysis from the Financial Times.

The two Chinese companies ordered approximately 230,000 of Nvidia’s Hopper GPUs each, including the H20 model which has been developed to adhere to strict US export restrictions for China.

The report reveals that Microsoft bought 485,000 Hopper chips in 2024, far ahead of its competitors.

Microsoft Spending on Nvidia — (Image credit: Omdia)

Chinese influence

“Good data center infrastructure, they’re very complex, capital-intensive projects,” Alistair Speirs, Microsoft’s senior director of Azure Global Infrastructure, told the Financial Times. “They take multi-years of planning. And so forecasting where our growth will be with a little bit of buffer is important.”

In contrast, Meta bought 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 reliance 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 captured 43 percent of server hardware spending in 2024, but AMD also performed strongly, with Microsoft purchasing 96,000 of its Instinct MI300 chips and Meta acquiring 173,000.

While Microsoft leads comfortably in GPU acquisitions, the substantial investments made by ByteDance and Tencent reflect the determination of Chinese firms to secure a strong position in the AI race – a momentum that is expected to carry into 2025.

In outspending Google, Meta, Tesla/xAI and Amazon in units purchased, the two Chinese companies have shown they can compete with the biggest of the American tech giants, despite the significant challenges posed by the ongoing trade restrictions which are expected to intensify even further under the Trump administration.