Microsoft plans to stockpile 1.8 million gpus at the bottom of the 2024, meaning it could triple the number of gpus it has in the 2024. Microsoft expects to spend about $100 billion on gpus and data centers by fiscal year 2027, people familiar with the matter were quoted as saying. It follows news that Microsoft and OpenAI are planning an ambitious data center project to build a massive AI supercomputer called the Stargate, the cost is expected to be as high as $100BN, 100 times the current cost of the largest data centre. In the industry, where demand for GPU chips continues to grow as key components of artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and the development of large-scale language models, tech giants are building huge stockpiles of GPU chips. In this context, as Nvidia's A100, H100, A800 and H800 high-performance GPU chips have also become the target of competition among major AI companies, although now the supply of H100 bottleneck has eased, but prices have remained constant at $25,000-$30,000.

Analysts at DA Davidson estimate that Microsoft spent $4.5 bn on Nvidia chips last year, a figure confirmed by a senior Microsoft Executive. Even just maintaining basic operations for CHATGPT would cost about $16bn a year. In March, Meta also released details and a roadmap for its AI infrastructure, saying it plans to acquire about 350,000 H100 gpus from Nvidia by the end of the year, by then, the company will have nearly 600,000 pieces of computing power H100 can provide. Even at a minimum selling price of $25,000, the 350,000 H100 would cost about $8.75 billion. By some counts, Nvidia sold 2.5 M chips last year, almost monopolising the market. Nvidia accounts for more than 70% of the market, according to Omdia, a research firm. To reduce its reliance on NVIDIA, Microsoft is actively developing its own AI chips. However, this effort may not be seen by some employees as wise or even a waste of resources. One Microsoft executive admitted that the company's development process had lagged behind Nvidia's technological advances by several years. Not only is this a costly task, he stresses, but even if Microsoft eventually succeeds in developing its own chips, cutting-edge technologies may have made progress again in this fierce competition.