Nvidia Sold 900 Tons of H100 GPUs Last Quarter, Says Analyst Firm

Omdia
(Image credit: Omdia)

When Nvidia said that it sold $10.3 billion worth of datacenter hardware in Q2 of its fiscal year 2024, we could imagine that the company sold tons of its high-end H100 compute GPUs, but market research firm Omdia says that Nvidia literally sold 900 tons of H100 processors in the second quarter of calendar 2023.

Omdia estimates that Nvidia shipped over 900 tons (1.8 million pounds) of H100 compute GPUs for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications in the second quarter. Omdia believes that the average weight of one Nvidia H100 compute GPU with the heatsink is over 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds), so Nvidia shipped over 300 thousand H100s in the second quarter.

Omdia

(Image credit: Omdia)

The Nvidia H100 comes in three different form factors, and all have different weights. An Nvidia H100 PCIe card weights 1.2 kilograms, and while the weight of the Nvidia H100 SXM module is unknown (we've pinged Nvidia), but the weight of an OAM module with heatsink — which is about the same size and TDP with an H100 SXM — tops at 2 kilograms. Assuming that 80% of Nvidia H100 shipments are modules and 20% are cards, the average weight of a single H100 should be about 1.84 kilograms. Omdia says that it estimated the weight based on the number of H100s it believes Nvidia shipped in calendar Q2, so the actual weight may be less than 900 tons, but we can still say that Nvidia supplied literally tons of H100s in the second quarter.

Omdia says it expects Nvidia to sell roughly the same amount of GPUs in the coming quarters, so the company is on pace to sell about 3,600 tons, or 7.2 million pounds, of H100 GPUs this year. That works out to roughly 1.2 million H100 GPUs per year, if the pace remains the same.

Omdia

(Image credit: Omdia)

This is a rough estimate, but shipping over 300 thousand H100 GPUs in one quarter is a massive achievement. While we imagine that the H100 number includes China-oriented H800 processors, we should also keep in mind that the company ships tons (perhaps literally) of its previous-generation A100, A800, and A30 compute GPUs to companies that already use them for AI inference and technical computing, so the actual number of compute GPUs that Nvidia sells per quarter is considerably higher than 300 thousand, and far more than 900 tons in total. 

This obviously isn't enough to supply the insatiable global demand for GPUs — Nvidia's AI GPUs are sold out beyond the end of the year. As such, we can expect the rate of shipments to accelerate in the coming year as Nvidia cashes in on the generative AI craze. 

To add some more context to the story, here are some other things that weigh 900 tons:

  • 4.5 Boeings 747s
  • 11 Space Shuttle Orbiters
  • 215,827 gallons of water
  • 299 Ford F150-Lightnings
  • 181,818 PlayStation 5s
  • 32,727 Golden Retrievers
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • BX4096
    Admin said:
    To add some more context to the story, here are some other things that weigh 900 tons:
    4.5 Boeings 747s
    11 Space Shuttle Orbiters
    215,827 gallons of water
    299 Ford F150-Lightnings
    181,818 PlayStation 5s
    32,727 Golden Retrievers
    Or a third Elon Musk's net worth converted into $100 dollar bills and weighed. Also, you have a rounding error in your Golden Retriever count. It's 32,727 Retrievers and 3 Chihuahuas, to be precise.
    Reply
  • zecoeco
    All to run a stupid chatbot, and evilish projects to replace me and you the author, then he's or she's company or business offload more employees, increasing their profits, and leading to a crowd of jobless people.

    The hype is real ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    Reply
  • aberkae
    zecoeco said:
    All to run a stupid chatbot, and evilish projects to replace me and you the author, then he's or she's company or business offload more employees, increasing their profits, and leading to a crowd of jobless people.

    The hype is real ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    All to yield a 25% anonomoly rate. They will milk the plautau to get to the 99.99999% accuracy.
    Reply
  • thisisaname

    To add some more context to the story, here are some other things that weigh 900 tons:

    4.5 Boeings 747s
    11 Space Shuttle Orbiters
    215,827 gallons of water
    299 Ford F150-Lightnings
    181,818 PlayStation 5s
    32,727 Golden Retrievers

    900 US tonnes is 816466KG or 1360776 hibernation weight hedgehogs which is around about 1.55 times the UK population.
    Reply
  • pjmelect
    4.5 Boeings 747s
    11 Space Shuttle Orbiters
    215,827 gallons of water
    299 Ford F150-Lightnings
    181,818 PlayStation 5s
    32,727 Golden Retrievers
    Americans will use anything other than the metric system.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Kind of silly way to measure them, since we all know the mass of these products is dominated by the cooling system. It sure is a lot of copper, though.
    Reply
  • emike09
    That's around 180,000 cats!!!!
    Reply
  • NeoMorpheus
    What its the point of this article, besides the usual ngreedia hyping?
    Reply
  • Geef
    emike09 said:
    That's around 180,000 cats!!!!

    No way, nowadays people overfeed their cats quite a bit. I'm sure everyone knows somebody who has a way overweight cat.

    I'd say only around 100k cats!
    Reply
  • in_the_loop
    Geef said:
    No way, nowadays people overfeed their cats quite a bit. I'm sure everyone knows somebody who has a way overweight cat.

    I'd say only around 100k cats!
    Reply