Artificial intelligence is a buoyant sector, and NVIDIA is clearly profiting from it – handsomely, in fact. We learn that the company shipped over 900t of cards dedicated to AI in the second quarter… And not just any cards, but H100s, GPUs selling for tens of thousands of dollars!
900t of AI-dedicated GPUs shipped in the second quarter?
In itself, this news doesn’t add up to much, but it’s always interesting to put things into perspective. If Omdia is to be believed, NVIDIA sold no less than 300,000 H100 GPUs in the previous quarter. However, Omdia estimates that in this second quarter, the greens would have shipped no less than 900t of hardware… That is, if we round up the weight of a card to 3kg. In reality, however, this is not quite the case, as the PCIe version weighs in at 1.2 kg. Now the question is, how much heavier is the PCIe SXM card: ~2 kg.
Based on Tom’s Hardware estimates, and assuming that NVIDIA had sold 80% (240,000 SXM and 60,000 PCIe) of SXM-format cards, we get a weight of 552t. Even though this is well below the 900t figure put forward by Omdia, it’s still impressive, especially over a quarter.
Now, in terms of sales. NVIDIA announced that its datacenter section recorded sales of $10.3 billion, compared with $2.49 billion for the gaming section. Bear in mind, however, that the chameleon doesn’t only sell H100s in this sector. Nevertheless, if we estimate an H100 at $30,000, we end up with a figure of $9 billion in AI-related hardware alone, which just goes to show how important this sector is to the company!
