Three of China's largest technology groups have placed an order book for Nvidia silicon that rivals the GDP of a small country - and the supplier is warning much of it may never be filled. Reuters reported on October 20, citing two people familiar with the matter plus a third, that ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have collectively ordered more than three million of Nvidia's new RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, with a combined sticker price above 35 billion dollars. The cards are priced at roughly 11,400 dollars each. None of the three companies responded to requests for comment, and Nvidia has not confirmed the order figures.
The allocation math is the story behind the headline. One source said Nvidia has told partners they might receive only 5 to 10 percent of the quantities requested. Another said the company indicated it could produce no more than three million RTX PRO 5500 cards globally in 2027 - while total orders from Chinese customers have already exceeded six million. From 2027, Nvidia is expected to devote much of its TSMC capacity to Rubin, its next-generation data center platform, leaving little room to expand workstation-card output. Early samples are due in December, with commercial deliveries beginning in the first quarter of 2027, according to the report.
Why a workstation card? The RTX PRO 5500 is designed for powerful professional computers, not the rack-scale clusters that run frontier training jobs. But it is among the most capable Nvidia chips still available to Chinese buyers: the Blackwell-based B300 data center chip is banned outright under US export controls, while Hopper-based H200 exports are reviewed case by case. Chinese companies want the cards primarily for AI inference - running trained models rather than building them - which needs less compute per request than training.
The appetite marks a sharp reversal. When Nvidia launched the RTX 6000D, a reduced-capability chip built to satisfy US rules, major Chinese tech firms initially showed little interest, viewing it as overpriced and betting Washington would eventually allow more powerful sales. Those expectations have faded. Reuters reports the RTX 6000D has since been discontinued, and its market price in China has doubled - a signal of how scarce compliant compute has become. Demand now reaches well below the giants: on October 13, Shenzhen-listed Tansun Technology disclosed an agreement to buy 20,000 RTX PRO 5500 cards, while cautioning that shortages and export controls could delay or shrink deliveries.
Nvidia's public position walks a line between complaining and complying. A spokesperson said Chinese producers of workstation chips and cards have experienced "unprecedented growth since 2022," and argued that "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." CEO Jensen Huang has said the restrictions cut Nvidia's share of China's AI data center chip market from a near monopoly to effectively nothing - even as the company keeps finding compliant products to sell into it.
Markets barely flinched: Nvidia shares slipped about 0.2 percent in premarket trading on Tuesday. The longer-term pressure sits elsewhere. Washington's curbs have pushed Chinese firms toward domestic suppliers, with Huawei gaining share, though Chinese chipmakers still generally trail leading American products - partly because separate restrictions limit their access to advanced manufacturing equipment. Beijing, for its part, has been encouraging homegrown silicon.
The uncomfortable fact inside a 35-billion-dollar headline is that it is a list price, not revenue, and possibly not hardware. An order is a claim on future allocation; the source-specified cap of three million cards in 2027 means most of that claim will be renegotiated, deferred, or redirected to domestic alternatives. What the order book really measures is anxiety - Chinese AI operators locking a place in whatever compliant queue exists, while the queue itself proves how central Nvidia remains even where its best chips are forbidden.
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