H100, 900 tons were sold last quarter!

When Nvidia said it sold $10.3 billion worth of data center hardware in the second quarter of fiscal 2024, we could imagine the company sold a lot of high-end H100 compute GPUs, but market research firm Omdia said Nvidia actually sold 900 tons The H100 processor will be launched in the second quarter of 2023.

Omdia estimates that Nvidia shipped more than 900 tons (1.8 million pounds) of its H100 computing GPUs for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications in the second quarter. Omdia believes that the average Nvidia H100 computing GPU with a heatsink weighs more than 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds), so Nvidia shipped more than 300,000 H100 units in the second quarter.

The Nvidia H100 comes in three different form factors, all with different weights. The Nvidia H100 PCIe card weighs 1.2kg, and while the weight of the Nvidia H100 SXM module is unknown (we've contacted Nvidia), the weight of the OAM module with the heatsink - which has roughly the same dimensions and TDP as the H100 SXM - tops out at 2kg. Assuming that 80% of Nvidia H100 shipments are modules and 20% are cards, then the average weight of a single H100 should be around 1.84 kg. Omdia says its weight is estimated based on the number of H100s Nvidia shipped in the second quarter, so the actual weight may be less than 900 tons, but we can still say that Nvidia supplied several tons of H100s in the second quarter.

Omdia said it expects Nvidia to sell roughly the same number of GPUs in the coming quarters, so the company expects to sell around 3,600 tonnes (or £7.2m) of H100 GPUs this year. If the growth rate remains constant, that's about 1.2 million H100 GPUs per year.

This is a rough estimate, but selling over 300,000 H100 GPUs in a quarter is a huge achievement. While we imagine the H100 numbers include H800 processors for China, we should also remember that the company shipped a lot (perhaps literally) of its previous-generation A100, A800, and A30 processors to companies that were already using them for artificial intelligence GPU reasoning and technical computing, so the actual number of computing GPUs sold by Nvidia per quarter is much higher than 300,000, and the total volume is well over 900 tons.

That's clearly not enough to satisfy the world's insatiable demand for GPUs - Nvidia has sold out of its AI GPUs after the end of the year. As a result, we expect shipments to accelerate in the coming year as Nvidia profits from the generative AI boom.

To add more context to the story, here are some other 900-ton items:

• 4.5 Boeing 747s

• 11 space shuttle orbiters

• 215,827 gallons of water

• 299 Ford F150-Lightning

• 181,818 PlayStation 5 units

• 32,727 Golden Retrievers