Microsoft buys twice as many Nvidia AI chips as its biggest rivals – report

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), OpenAI’s biggest investors, has acquired twice as many AI chips from Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) as its biggest rivals this year, the Financial Times reported, citing estimates from tech consultancy Omdia.

The tech giant bought 485,000 of Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) Hopper chips this year, Omdia analysts estimated, well above 224,000 chips bought by Meta (META) – Nvidia’s second biggest U.S. customer. Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) purchased 196,000 and 169,000 Hopper chips, respectively, this year.

Chinese firms ByteDance (BDNCE) and Tencent (OTCPK:TCEHY) each ordered about 230,000 of Nvidia’s chips, including the H20 that’s less powerful than Hopper. H20 chips were developed to meet U.S. export controls for Chinese customers.

Omdia’s estimates are based on companies’ publicly disclosed capital spending, server shipments and supply chain intelligence.

Tech companies worldwide are estimated to spend around $229B on servers this year, led by Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) $31B and Amazon’s (AMZN) $26B. Some 43% of the overall spending went to Nvidia (NVDA).

Tech firms also ramped up development of their own AI chips to scale back reliance on Nvidia (NVDA). Google (GOOG) and Meta (META) each deployed about 1.5M of their chips this year, while Amazon (AMZN) deployed around 1.3M of its chips.

But Microsoft (MSFT) is lagging rivals as it installed only about 200,000 of its Maia chips this year, the report noted.

Notably, Omdia estimates Meta (META) bought 173,000 of AMD’s (AMD) MI300 chips this year and Microsoft (MSFT) bought 96,000.