- Microsoft bought more than twice as many of Nvidia’s Hopper chips in 2024 than its next largest customer. Chips have been in short supply in Silicon Valley as the most important companies race to one-up one another’s AI capabilities. But after two years of shortages, Microsoft finally has the amount of AI chips it needs, according to CEO Satya Nadella.
Earlier this year, Fortune reported that nearly half of Nvidia’s revenue was coming from just a handful of companies spending billions on its hottest products, like chips built for training AI models. Now, we finally have more insight about those mystery whales—and it appears Microsoft is the largest among them.
Microsoft bought more of Nvidia’s top-of-the-line Hopper chips than any of its other Big Tech rivals in 2024, according to an estimate from tech industry research firm Omdia. The Redmond, Wash.–based tech giant, which is also OpenAI’s largest investor, purchased 485,000 high-performance computing chips, far more than any of the other major Silicon Valley developers in the AI race.
Nvidia’s next largest customers were the Chinese tech firms Tencent and TikTok owner ByteDance. Both purchased less than half as many chips as Microsoft, with roughly 230,000 over the course of this year, according to Omdia’s estimates. The next largest U.S. customer was Meta, which bought approximately 224,000 of Nvidia’s Hopper chips.
For the past two years, the Hopper chip has been Nvidia’s most advanced, but it will be replaced by the upgraded Blackwell in 2025.
Microsoft’s rivals in the AI race—Amazon and Google—acquired roughly 196,000 and 169,000 Hopper chips, respectively. Meta, Amazon, and Google are all working on developing their own chips, which they intend to use to power their future AI ambitions.
Microsoft’s massive stockpile of Nvidia chips indicates it is committing vast financial and computing resources to developing the systems it, and much of the tech industry, believe will be the defining technology of the future. OpenAI kicked off the current AI arms race when it released ChatGPT-3.5 in November 2022. Since that time, Nvidia’s other major customers have funneled vast amounts of capital expenditures on research and development.
Meta expects to devote between $38 billion and $40 billion to capex companywide, largely driven by investments into data centers and computing infrastructure for AI. In the first three quarters of this year, Google’s capex rose 80% compared with the same period last year to $38.3 billion, according to SEC filings. Meanwhile, Amazon has invested in the development of its own AI capabilities and acquired a substantial stake in leading AI startup Anthropic.
But Microsoft’s substantial purchases seem to be helping it secure enough AI chips, which had previously been in short supply. In a BG2 podcast interview last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company no longer faced a shortage of chips. “I am power [constrained], yes, I’m not chip-supply constrained,” he said.
Over the past two years, it’s been extremely hard for developers to get enough AI chips. Manufacturers like Nvidia and AMD could barely keep up with the roaring demand for their products. For Microsoft, those days seem to be over.
“We were definitely constrained in ’24,” Nadella said. “What we have told the street is that’s why we are optimistic about the first half of ’25, which is the rest of our fiscal year. And then after that I think we’ll be in better shape going into 2026.”
A spokesperson for Microsoft said the company continued to expand its partnerships with chip manufacturers. “Partners such as Nvidia enable us to incorporate the best innovation of the industry into Microsoft infrastructure,” the spokesperson said.
Nvidia declined to comment on Omdia’s report.
These most recent reports on Nvidia’s customers come at a time when demand for the chipmaker’s products is under renewed scrutiny. Comments like Nadella’s have some investors worried that years of blockbuster demand could be waning. After three years of record-breaking performance, Nvidia’s stock has dropped slightly in recent weeks. Bullish investors have said this was the result of long-term investors selling stock to bring home some of their profits, rather than a lack of faith from Wall Street. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang swatted away concerns about the company’s future on its latest earnings call in October. Demand for its soon-to-be-released Blackwell chip was “insane,” with customers lining up to get their hands on the new release, he told CNBC at the time.
“Everybody wants to have the most, and everybody wants to be first,” Huang said.
