Microsoft is Nvidia's biggest AI chip buyer of the year, and it's not even close. With ByteDance and Tencent coming out ahead of Zuck, Bezos, and Musk's outfits, too

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TAIPEI, TAIWAN - 2023/06/01: Jensen Huang, President of NVIDIA holding the Grace hopper superchip CPU used for generative AI at supermicro keynote presentation during the COMPUTEX 2023. The COMPUTEX 2023 runs from 30 May to 02 June 2023 and gathers over 1,000 exhibitors from 26 different countries with 3000 booths to display their latest products and to sign orders with foreign buyers.

Yeah, I get it, wealready knowthat Nvidia’s sold a motherlode of chips and is laughing its way to the bank. But it hits a little differently to see the actual numbers.

In other words, despite export controls, Chinese companies received more Nvidia chips than companies such as Meta, Amazon, and Google this year.

Apart from all the China biz, there are two other things that strike me about these numbers. First, and very simply: Holy moly does Nvidia churn out a lot of a AI chips. Second: Holy moly does Microsoft buya lot of them.

Nvidia’s part kind of goes without saying. The company is firmly cemented as the king of the ever-expanding AI infrastructure castle. So much so, in fact, that the company’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, has the chutzpah to claim that"just like we generate electricity, we’re now going to be generating AI" in “AI factories”.

As far as Microsoft’s concerned, while I’m a little surprised to find the company more than doubling the purchases of any other, it also makes sense, especially given thepartnership with OpenAI.

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The AI industry can seem a little confusing when you start to look into how all these different companies relate to each other. But we shouldn’t forget that while OpenAI technically isn’t the biggest company in the AI space, most of the companies that are bigger actually rely on OpenAI’s software and models and have partnerships with the company. So much is true for now, at least—although newer entrants such as Anthropic and Musk’s xAI could make inroads.

AI, explained(Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)What is artificial general intelligence?:We dive into the lingo of AI and what the terms actually mean.

AI, explained

(Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)What is artificial general intelligence?:We dive into the lingo of AI and what the terms actually mean.

(Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 5, 2022.

What is artificial general intelligence?:We dive into the lingo of AI and what the terms actually mean.

And if we’re talking OpenAI partnerships, Microsoft’s is the one. To date, Microsoft has apparentlyinvested $13 billion into OpenAIand is the exclusive provider of the company’s cloud computing services. This partnership grants Microsoft all kinds of benefits, such as OpenAI model integration with Bing, Microsoft 365, Copilot, and so on, not to mention the ability to rent OpenAI-clad Azure servers out to customers for private or bespoke AI research or services.

Oh, and there’s the simple matter of monetary ROI. But it’s surely crude to speak of such things (profit motives in such a civil society? I think not).

People want AI and OpenAI is the biggest software-level solution, so Microsoft heavily invests in and partners with OpenAI, and Nvidia sells Microsoft a sweet, sweet stack of silicone to get the job done. Simple.

But who’s the real winner? The end-user, of course!

Just kidding, the real winner’s Nvidia, of course and as always. As Baron Harkonnen of Frank Herbert’sDunetells us: “He who controls the spice controls the universe.” And Hopper’s the spiciest spice in town, right now.

Well, it’ll be Blackwell, soon, but that’s Nvidia, too. Huang probably made the right choice going into tech andditching a promising table-tennis career.

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Best CPU for gaming: Top chips from Intel and AMD.Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game first.

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