An estimated 3.5 million Nvidia H100 GPUs have been sold in the last two years. These GPUs consume more power overall than some small European countries.

Nvidia sold half a million H100 GPUs last quarter, each using about 700 watts of power. That’s more than the average consumption of an American household. Since these GPUs are also actively used for AI workloads, the total energy consumption of these GPUs is now expected to be as high as that of an American city and even consume more electricity than some small European countries.

Higher electricity consumption than some small EU countries

The Nvidia H100 GPUs each consume 700 watts of power. When you know that the total consumption of all these GPUs combined is higher than the consumption in some small European countries, that’s quite a lot. At 61% annual usage, an H100 GPU would consume approximately 3,740 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per year. Assuming that Nvidia has sold 3.5 million such processors in the last two years, a total of 13,091,820,000 kWh of electricity is consumed per year.

The power consumption of GPUs seems quite shocking, but efficiency developments in AI and GPUs are only increasing. Nvidia does well in the GPU sector and owes its billions in sales primarily to the success of the H100 accelerators. Although competition is always lurking, Nvidia remains ahead.