Who holds the Nvidia chips

On that measure, as of 31 December 2025 and in Token Runner's 9 October 2026 collection of Epoch's file, Microsoft held about 3.2 million H100-equivalents of Nvidia chips, in a range from 2.4 million to 4.1 million. A row Epoch calls "Other", which its documentation says includes neoclouds, "Sovereign AI" projects, enterprises and research organisations, held about 3.0 million. Then Meta at about 1.8 million, Amazon 1.4 million, Google 1.2 million, Oracle 1.0 million and CoreWeave about 830,000. xAI held about 550,000, an estimate Epoch marks as lumpy and lagging because it is read from deployed data centres rather than from sales, and it carries no range. The chart has the exact figures.

The ranges matter more than the order. Microsoft's low end sits above every other named owner's high end, so Microsoft stands clear; the one exception is the "Other" row, whose range, from 2.0 million to 4.2 million, contains Microsoft's. Below it, every range overlaps at least one other: Meta's runs from 1.4 million to 2.4 million and Amazon's from 1.1 million to 1.8 million; Google's from 1.0 million to 1.6 million and Oracle's from about 770,000 to 1.4 million; CoreWeave's, the narrowest, from about 790,000 to 880,000, inside Oracle's. Epoch's data does not put those five in a complete order, and this article does not either.

The geography says the same thing. Nvidia reports revenue by the headquarters of its direct customer, and it estimates that 76 per cent of the Data Center revenue it booked to customers headquartered in Taiwan in fiscal 2026 was attributed to end customers in the United States and Europe. In its report for the quarter to 26 July 2026 Nvidia also names, without naming, "one AI research and deployment company" that contributed "a meaningful amount of our revenue" through cloud purchases. So Epoch's count and Nvidia's own figure for its indirect customers are both estimates.

The two orders disagree, and the records explain most of the gap. Capital spending buys buildings, land, power and networks as well as chips, and the filings do not split it. And Amazon and Google buy their own chips too: Epoch puts Google's holdings of its own TPUs at about 3.8 million H100-equivalents at the end of 2025 and Amazon's Trainium at about 1.0 million. Add Google's own chips to its Nvidia ones, which is the one sum our table allows, a sum of two of Epoch's medians with no range, and Google holds about 5.0 million H100-equivalents against Microsoft's 3.4 million including Microsoft's AMD chips. Who holds the most Nvidia chips, who spends the most and who holds the most compute are three questions with three different answers.

CoreWeave's quarterly report for June 2026 shows what that looks like from the landlord's side: three customers were 36, 26 and 10 per cent of its revenue in the quarter, where a year earlier one customer had been 71 per cent; OpenAI "committed to pay us up to approximately $6.5 billion through May 31, 2031"; Meta signed for up to about $21.0 billion; Jane Street for about $6.0 billion. And Nvidia bought $2.0 billion of CoreWeave's shares in January 2026.

Nvidia's financial ties to its customers are described one way in an investor's posts and another in Nvidia's own filing. Through the summer of 2026 the investor Michael Burry wrote on X that Nvidia was financing its own customers: on 22 July that Nvidia's "formal rebuttal was that its 'strategic' investments in its customers 'represent a minimal portion of revenue' already booked", while in the "forward book" of announced multi-year commitments "circular financing is nearly 100% to date"; on 12 August, of a "$500 billion" arrangement, that it "involves Nvidia taking 25% stakes & providing residual value guarantees on purchase of its chips".

Nvidia's quarterly report, filed on 26 August 2026, says that in August Nvidia "entered into guarantees, capped at a total of $105 billion", for leases "on behalf of a customer, an affiliate of OpenAI Group PBC (OpenAI)"; that they "are limited to defined portions of lease and power payments"; and that payment is "triggered upon certain tenant defaults". It reports up to $3.5 billion of guarantees of AI cloud partners' leases "in the event of their default"; "equity investments of $99 billion and equity investment commitments of $25 billion" in what it calls "our ecosystem", naming no investee; and $36 billion of "AI cloud agreements" under which Nvidia has "agreed to purchase" committed capacity the clouds do not sell to others.

Of third-party financing platforms it says it "entered into memorandums of understanding" in August, that these "may not lead to definitive agreements", and that "At our option, we may provide limited residual-value support for a portion of specific projects"; and it lists as exhibit 10.1 a "Form of Residual Value Guaranty", which Token Runner has not read. Mr Burry's word for such ties, in his post of 22 July 2026, is circular. The filing does not use it, and names OpenAI for the lease guarantee alone. That is as far as the record read for this article goes.

The second row, "China (smuggled)", is what Epoch calls a speculative estimate from a separate model of diverted and resold chips: about 660,000 H100-equivalents at the end of 2025, in a range from about 290,000 to 1.6 million. Its low end is below the China row, and its high end, 1.6 million, is about four times the China row's 400,000. Here the conversation adds what the filings cannot. In an X thread on 17 September 2026 Epoch wrote that China recorded "$3.8 billion in server imports from Malaysia, averaging $106,000 each", a flow that "could represent 150,000 H100e of compute, about a quarter of our earlier modeled estimate of all chips smuggled into China through 2025", while adding: "This doesn't prove diversion". CSET put the measurement problem in one line on 6 October 2026: "AI chip smuggling is like an iceberg: we only see what's above the surface."

The buyers have filed commitments too, of two kinds: what Alphabet is committed to pay, and the contracted revenue Microsoft and Oracle have yet to recognise. Alphabet reports $707.0 billion of fixed or guaranteed commitments, "the significant majority of which related to long-term supply agreements". Microsoft reports commercial remaining performance obligations of $678 billion; Oracle, $664 billion, up from $455 billion a year earlier, an increase it calls "primarily attributable to certain significant cloud contracts". None of those numbers is a count of chips, and none says which chips. But they are what is filed.

Two things to watch. Whether Epoch's ranges narrow as the vendors' filings catch up with deliveries. And whether the users become owners: OpenAI and Anthropic, who today rent from Microsoft, Oracle, CoreWeave, Amazon and Google.