Ask HN: Where Are Nvidia's GPUs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where Are Nvidia's GPUs?

3 pointsalecco8 comments

There's been a debate this weekend on fintwit about how the projection of Nvidia's shipped GPUs this year is way more than the power capacity and the speed of datacenter construction.

Most people think of 2 possible explanations: a) Nvidia is lying (mostly fintwit), or b) China bought a significant chunk of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, either black market or by some kind of proxy (mostly tech bros).

OG post with analysis: https://xcancel.com/kakashiii111/status/1997642056156463411

Even Michael Burry jumped into the discussion and requested pics of the warehouses holding the GPUs: "Calling for pics and proof of Nvidia GPUs being warehoused in mass quantities [...]" https://xcancel.com/michaeljburry/status/1997752436589818353

GNX earlier documental on the Chinese black market for Nvidia GPUs (but mostly consumer RTX) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI (August 2025)

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Microsoft CEO says the company doesn't have enough electricity to install all the AI GPUs in its inventory - 'you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in'

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-ceo-says-company-do...

We might be dealing with a MiniScribe situation (bricks being shipped to warehouses to inflate inventory statistics). And if so, we'll need about 2 years till all of the new DCs catch up with getting hardware wheeled in. But by then, it will have to be considered obsolete...

Rumor has it that much of the capacity is routed through to two "mystery customers" that regularly show up on the Nvidia balance book. One is probably NRO, the other is your pick of an alphabet soup agency.

Plot thickens... But this doesn't explain the lack of power and datacenters.

Sure it does. NRO has decades-old datacenters built to-spec around a specific wattage. If the order comes from on-high to replace the racks with new equipment, then you could even see a net reduction in power use and datacenters.

I might be an useful idiot in this case, but I can't imagine they would be that late to the game. I suppose they get dibs on anything that's a year ahead of its time before manufacturers send it to the unwashed masses.

Devil's advocate; DoD is probably (read: certainly) one of the sample customers for Intel's 18a node. If the rumors around that manufacturing process are anything close to true, the DoD is probably not super satisfied with the yield and probably can't imagine any cutting-edge applications for the chips.

That puts them in an awkward position and somewhat unable to cut corners around Nvidia. It's possible that 18a has improved a lot recently, but it's also possible that the feds are a big-ticket player in the GPGPU arena.

in hot water /s

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