Three of China's biggest tech companies have ordered more than 3 million of Nvidia's new RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, a bet worth over $35 billion at sticker price, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing two people familiar with the matter. But Nvidia may be able to deliver only a small fraction of them.
ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent placed the orders for cards priced at about $11,400 each, two of the people told Reuters. Nvidia has told customers and partners it cannot guarantee it can fill the orders because demand from Chinese technology companies far exceeds planned production, those two people and a third said. All three spoke anonymously.
Total orders from customers in China have topped 6 million cards, two of the people said. One said Nvidia told partners they might receive only 5% to 10% of what they asked for. Another said Nvidia had indicated it could make no more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 cards worldwide in 2027.
The RTX PRO 5500 is a workstation card, built for powerful professional computers rather than the huge data-center clusters that run Nvidia's top AI chips. But Reuters reported that it is among the most powerful Nvidia chips Chinese buyers can still get. Nvidia's Blackwell-based B300 data-center chip cannot be sold to Chinese buyers under US export controls. Exports of its older Hopper-based H200 are reviewed case by case and come with licensing conditions.
That makes the workstation card an export-compliant route to Nvidia hardware. Chinese companies mainly want the cards for AI inference, the work of running already-trained models to answer chatbot queries, all three people told Reuters. Reuters said the RTX PRO 5500 performs similarly to the RTX 6000D, according to product specifications it reviewed.
Nvidia launched the RTX 6000D last year as a scaled-back product built to meet US export rules, and major Chinese tech firms initially shrugged, according to earlier Reuters reporting. Buyers hoped Washington would eventually allow sales of more powerful chips. Those hopes have faded as restrictions stayed in place and computing capacity stayed scarce, two of the people said. The RTX 6000D has since been discontinued, and its price in China has doubled, one person said.
For Nvidia, the orders suggest China is not the lost market it once looked like. Chief Executive Jensen Huang has said US restrictions cut Nvidia's share of China's AI data-center chip market from a near monopoly to effectively nothing. But if Nvidia ships only 5% to 10% of the volume requested, the revenue that actually lands would be a small slice of the $35 billion headline.
Part of the constraint is Nvidia's own priorities. Starting in 2027, the company is expected to devote much of its capacity at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co to Rubin, its next-generation data-center platform, rather than products like the RTX PRO 5500, two of the people said. TSMC declined to comment. Nvidia has told customers to expect early samples in December, with commercial deliveries starting in the first quarter of 2027, according to the people.
Nvidia did not address the orders directly. A spokesperson told Reuters that Chinese makers of workstation chips and cards have seen "unprecedented growth since 2022," when the curbs were first imposed. "US firms continue to be restricted by a combination of outdated US export controls, which cover gaming products released nearly a half a decade ago, and China's own limit on US imports," the spokesperson said.
ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment. Neither did the US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, which oversees the export controls, or China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
That leaves the biggest question open. Washington has rewritten its chip export rules several times since 2022, and an order book this size for a card Reuters calls export-compliant could invite fresh scrutiny. Nothing in the Reuters report indicates the Commerce Department plans to change the rules.
Reuters also cited an October 13 filing in which Shenzhen-listed Tansun Technology said it had agreed to buy 20,000 RTX PRO 5500 cards from an unnamed counterparty. It warned that supply shortages, industry demand and overseas technology controls could delay deliveries or shrink volumes.