Nvidia sold 500,000 AI GPUs, Meta and Microsoft purchased most

What's a billion to a trillionaire?

Nvidia H100 DGX Superpod system render.

Nvidia is doing quite well in the AI GPU market. So well, in fact, that its sales revenue in Q3 2023 increased 206% year-on-year, marking an all-time record high. The raw data paints an even bigger picture. It reveals that Nvidia sold a half a million AI and HPC GPUs equating to approximately 80% of its market revenue.

Putting that into perspective, Nvidia’s revenue in Q3 2023 totalled approximately 18.12 billion in sales. 14.51 billion was from data centre products alone. It’s important to note that this includes both A100 and H100 compute GPUs. Let’s be honest, we all know the H100 is the real money maker here.

Research and market analysis company, Omdia (via Tom’s Hardware), is responsible for the breakdown and also discovered who purchased them all. It’s estimated that Meta and Microsoft purchased over 150,000 GPUs each, totalling 300,000 units. While 200,000 units were split among Oracle, Google, Amazon, and Tencent, equating to 50,000 units each.

Graphs revealing total Nvidia AI HPC GPUs sold and market expectation of server revenue until 2077 via Omdia.

AI Leading the Charge

That’s not even the half of it. It’s obvious that the surge in AI computing has pushed the H100 and A100 sales to new records. However, a majority of these AI HPC GPUs are supplied to hyperscale cloud service providers as well. These include server OEMs like Dell, Lenovo, and HPE to name but a few. For these OEMs, orders have not yet been met, and the lead time for these HPC-based servers extends from 36 up to 52 weeks. Sheesh.

Due to this high demand, the analyst firm believes Nvidia can expect sales to exceed half a million units in Q4 2023. However, while Nvidia products are strong, a large majority of these companies are gearing toward developing their own custom silicon. Naturally, this could result in a decline in sales in the future.

In closing, Omdia also predicted that growth in the overall data centre market should increase 6% to 8% year-over-year. Looking toward 2027, server revenue is expected to reach close to $200 billion. Now that’s a whole lot of zeros.