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Chinese cloud giants Tencent and TikTok parent ByteDance were the top buyers of Nvidia’s flagship AI chips in 2024, trailing only Microsoft. The two Chinese companies each ordered nearly 230,000 units of Nvidia’s Hopper GPUs, including the H20 model, which was developed to comply with strict US export restrictions for China. The volume of purchases shows the companies’ serious desire to develop their AI infrastructure. According to the international media service Tekna, citing the Financial Times, Microsoft purchased about 485,000 Hopper chips in 2024, far more than its competitors. In contrast, Meta bought 224,000 units, followed by Amazon and Google with 196,000 and 169,000 units of Hopper GPUs in 2024, respectively. The three tech giants are increasingly moving away from reliance on Nvidia hardware as they develop their own custom silicon in-house. Google has deployed 1.5 million Meta TPUs, 1.5 million MTIA chips, and Amazon has deployed 1.3 million Trinium and Infernia chips, while Microsoft, which is still in its early stages, has installed about 200,000 Maya chips. This diversity in processor usage reflects the companies’ efforts to reduce their reliance on a single supplier and increase flexibility in their infrastructure.

Nvidia will account for 43% of server hardware spending in 2024, but AMD also performed strongly, with Microsoft purchasing 96,000 Instinct MI300 chips and Meta 173,000 units. While Microsoft leads the way in GPU purchases by a wide margin, the significant investments made by ByteDance and Tencent demonstrate the determination of Chinese companies to secure a strong position in the AI ​​race, a trend that is expected to continue through 2025. These investments demonstrate the high importance of AI for Chinese companies and their efforts to compete with international competitors. By surpassing Google, Meta, Tesla (xAI) and Amazon in the number of units purchased, the two Chinese companies have shown that they can compete with the largest US tech giants despite significant challenges posed by ongoing trade restrictions that are expected to intensify even further under the Trump administration. This shows that trade restrictions have not completely prevented Chinese companies from accessing the technologies they need, and they continue to invest in this area.