A recent report from research company Omdia has estimated the sales of NVIDIA’s Hopper graphics accelerators, which are widely used in artificial intelligence (AI) tasks. According to the analysis, Microsoft emerged as the largest customer, purchasing almost 500,000 units of these powerful accelerators.
In fact, Microsoft bought a total of 485,000 accelerators in 2024. This represents a threefold increase in year-on-year purchases, highlighting the company’s growing investment in AI infrastructure. Meta* secured the second position, but its purchase figures were significantly lower, at 224,000 units—more than two times fewer than Microsoft’s purchase.
Other top global buyers of NVIDIA’s Hopper accelerators include Chinese tech giants ByteDance and Tencent, which together acquired around 230,000 units of the same generation of computing accelerators. These figures take into account modified versions, considering the export restrictions on the H20 model. ByteDance and Tencent hold the third and fourth positions, respectively.
Elon Musk’s Tesla and xAI secured the fifth spot with 200,000 Hopper accelerators, while Amazon followed closely in sixth place with 196,000 units. Google rounds out the top seven with 169,000 accelerators.
While the exact cost of the Hopper chips remains undisclosed, industry estimates suggest that one H100 accelerator costs approximately $30,000. Based on these figures, Microsoft’s total spending on Hopper accelerators is estimated at around $14.5 billion. With such a massive investment, Microsoft can not only build an advanced AI infrastructure for itself but also provide cutting-edge computing services to its customers. For instance, OpenAI has utilized Microsoft Azure’s computing resources to train its advanced language model, GPT-4.
