Chinese cloud services companies including Alibaba and Tencent rank as major Nvidia H100/H200 purchasers, second globally only to Microsoft.

Microsoft dominated Nvidia's Hopper GPU acquisitions in 2024, purchasing 485,000 chips, far ahead of its competitors, according to a report from Omdia and analysis from the Financial Times. Chinese cloud giants Tencent and ByteDance emerged as the second-largest buyers, each ordering approximately 230,000 of Nvidia's Hopper GPUs, including the H20 model developed to comply with strict US export restrictions for China.

The remaining major US technology companies significantly trailed these purchases. Meta acquired 224,000 Hopper GPUs in 2024, followed by Amazon with 196,000 units and Google with 169,000 units. Microsoft's senior director of Azure Global Infrastructure, Alistair Speirs, explained the substantial investment to the Financial Times: "Good data center infrastructure, they're very complex, capital-intensive projects. They take multi-years of planning. And so forecasting where our growth will be with a little bit of buffer is important."

The three American tech giants are increasingly moving away from Nvidia hardware dependence by developing custom silicon. Google deployed 1.5 million TPUs, Meta 1.5 million MTIA chips, and Amazon 1.3 million Trainium and Inferentia chips, while Microsoft, still in its early stages, installed around 200,000 Maia chips. Additionally, Nvidia captured 43 percent of server hardware spending in 2024, though AMD performed strongly with Microsoft purchasing 96,000 Instinct MI300 chips and Meta acquiring 173,000.

By outspending Google, Meta, Tesla/xAI, and Amazon in Hopper units purchased, Tencent and ByteDance have demonstrated their capacity to compete with the largest American technology companies in the AI race. This momentum is expected to continue into 2025, despite significant challenges posed by ongoing US trade restrictions that are anticipated to intensify further under the Trump administration.