- Microsoft buys nearly 500,000 Nvidia flagship Hopper chips in 2024
- TikTok parent company ByteDance and Tencent have almost the same amount of purchases
- It’s not just Meta, Tesla/xAI, Amazon and Google
Chinese cloud giant Tencent and TikTok parent ByteDance are major buyers NVIDIA2024 flagship AI chip, second only to Microsoftaccording to a report Omdia and analyze from financial times.
The two Chinese companies have each ordered approximately 230,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs, including the H20 model, which was developed to comply with strict U.S. export restrictions to China.
Reports show that Microsoft purchased 485,000 Hopper chips in 2024, far ahead of its competitors.
China influence
“Good data center infrastructure is a very complex, capital-intensive project,” said Alistair Speirs, senior director of global infrastructure for Azure at Microsoft. financial times. “They require multi-year planning. So it’s important to anticipate our growth with a little bit of a cushion.
By comparison, Meta purchased 224,000 Hopper GPUs in 2024, followed by Amazon and Google 196,000 and 169,000 units respectively. All three technology giants are gradually weaning themselves off dependence on Nvidia hardware by developing their own in-house custom chips. The British “Financial Times” stated that Google has deployed 1.5 million TPUs, Meta 1.5 million MTIA chips, Amazon 1.3 million Trainium and Inferentia chips, and Microsoft, which is still in the early stages, has installed about 200,000 Maia chips.
According to Omdia, Nvidia will account for 43% of server hardware spending in 2024, but AMD Performance was also strong, with Microsoft purchasing 96,000 Instinct MI300 chips and Meta purchasing 173,000.
Although Microsoft is far ahead in GPU acquisitions, the huge investments by ByteDance and Tencent reflect the determination of Chinese companies to gain a strong position in the artificial intelligence race – a momentum expected to continue until 2025.
Despite significant challenges posed by ongoing trade restrictions that are expected to intensify further, the two Chinese companies outsold Google, Meta, Tesla/xAI and Amazon in purchases, suggesting they can compete with the largest U.S. tech giants competition under the Trump administration.