More than 50% of Nvidia’s data center revenue comes from three customers — $21.9 billion in sales recorded from the unnamed companies

(Image credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia just released its second-quarter earnings for 2025, which showed the company breaking its sales records. This is great news for the AI GPU giant and its investors, but the quarterly report also showed a risk that the company is taking. Business publication Sherwood noted that nearly 53% of the reported revenue for the Green Team's Data Center division comes from just three unnamed customers, totaling about $21.9 billion in sales. This is broken down to $9.5 billion from Customer A, $6.6 billion from Customer B, and $5.7 billion from Customer C.

This might not sound like a problem — after all, why complain if three different entities are handing you piles and piles of money — but concentrating the majority of your sales to just a handful of clients could cause a sudden, unexpected issue. For example, the company’s entire second-quarter revenue is around $46 billion, which means that Customer A makes up more than 20% of its sales. If this company were to suddenly vanish (say it decided to build its own chips, go with AMD, or a scandal forces it to cease operations), then it would have a massive impact on Nvidia’s cash flow and operations.

These scenarios are unlikely to happen soon, though, as investors are still bullish about AI tech, and Nvidia’s competitors are still envious of the tech stack that the Green Team can offer. Still, resting the future of your company (especially one so big) on a narrow base will likely keep some executives awake at night.

Who are these heavy hitting clients?

The company did not name which institutions were its biggest clients, but we can take a guess based on the plans and announcements that several big tech companies have made. One of the first that comes to mind is Elon Musk and xAI. The billionaire has previously broken data center records, setting up 100,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs in a record 19 days last year — something that usually takes four years to finish, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. But more than that, Musk has dreams of running 50 million H100-equivalent GPUs in the next five years.

OpenAI and Oracle also recently signed a deal to build a Stargate data center with over 2 million AI chips — estimated to be equivalent to 5GW spread across 20 different data centers. Meta is also another big Nvidia customer that has recently been in the news, with Zuckerberg putting up data centers housed in tents and announcing plans for ‘several multi-GW clusters’, some of which are reportedly as large as Manhattan.

Even though Nvidia is facing issues with its China sales, first when President Donald Trump banned its H20 chip — resulting in a $5.5 billion write-off — and second, when Beijing instructed Chinese companies to stop buying the chips a few weeks after Trump reopened the H20 taps to China once again, these numbers could mean that the company is still relatively safe from ruin, even if it loses complete access to the East Asian country. So, Nvidia’s sales to these three companies are probably the reason why Huang can spend his time shuttling between Beijing and Washington, with his company seemingly being used as a political tool by both sides of the ongoing trade war.

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Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

3 Comments Comment from the forums

jlake3

Given Nvidia’s enormous size and valuation and the lock-in of CUDA it seems unlikely that they could be pushed around too hard, but it’s dangerous territory to be in.

I worked for an automotive supplier who supplied a decently diverse number of clients on paper, but in practice a single one of them was more than half the company’s volume/sales, and they absolutely knew it. We’d get RFQs from them for things we’d no-quote others on, and they’d say that if we didn’t bid we might not be asked to bid on other things… then if we quoted high because we didn’t wanna do it, they’d say we need to take garbage margins on that one, because if we didn’t we might not be asked to bid on parts we could make better margins on. When their engineers came to visit they saw the rules about escorts being required and no pictures allowed as being for other people. RMAs were basically non-negotiable with them.

If I were Nvidia, I wouldn’t fear someone vanishing or switching to in-house/AMD out of the blue so much as I’d worry about them becoming incredibly difficult and low margin, because they know they’re too big to fire as a client. Even if margins are bad, a bad margin on $22B is still a lot of money, and investors would freak out if sales dropped by 50%, regardless of why.
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A Stoner

They are add in board partners who nvidia sells chips to and who make the final product that is shipped to hundreds of thousands of other buyers. I saw this story on X and there is additional information that indicates these are not direct customers, like Elon Musk and so forth.
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bit_user

A Stoner said:
They are add in board partners who nvidia sells chips to and who make the final product that is shipped to hundreds of thousands of other buyers.
Certainly not gaming GPUs, since that's less than 10% of Nvidia's revenue. So, I guess some of them could be server manufacturers, like Dell or Supermicro, or systems integrators.

A Stoner said:
I saw this story on X
A trustworthy source, if ever there was one!
/s

A Stoner said:
there is additional information that indicates these are not direct customers, like Elon Musk and so forth.
Is there good intel that all three fall in this category, though?
Reply