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.
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.
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
