Meta Platforms (META) plans to spend billions of dollars this year buying microchips from Nvidia (NVDA) that power artificial intelligence (A.I.) applications.
In a post on Instagram, Meta chief executive officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg said the company will have 350,000 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPUs) and about 600,000 H100 compute equivalent GPUs by the end of 2024.
“Our long-term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit,” wrote Zuckerberg on social media.
With Nvidia’s top-of-line H100 data centre chips selling for an average price of $25,000 U.S. each, Meta Platforms could spend as much as $9 billion U.S. to acquire 350,000 of them.
Owing to furious demand from established technology companies and start-ups, some H100 GPUs are being resold on third-party sites such as eBay (EBAY) for $40,000 U.S. each.
Graphics processing units effectively run the parallel computations needed for A.I. projects and demand for them is red hot right now.
It is not known at what price Meta Platforms is able to acquire the chips from Nvidia.
The stock of Meta Platforms has risen 176% in the last 12 months to trade at $376.13 U.S. per share.
Nvidia’s stock has increased 240% over the past year and now trades at $571.07 U.S. a share.
