ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have placed orders for over 3 million NVIDIA RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, with total orders exceeding $35 billion.
October 20 - According to Reuters, ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have ordered over 3 million NVIDIA RTX PRO 5500 workstation graphics cards, at approximately $11,400 each, with total order value exceeding $35 billion. The chip complies with U.S. export control requirements to China and is one of the high-performance NVIDIA chips still available for purchase by Chinese buyers.
As demand from Chinese tech companies far exceeds NVIDIA's planned production capacity, the company has informed customers and partners that it cannot guarantee full delivery. Sources say NVIDIA may only be able to fulfill 5% to 10% of the quantity customers need, and global RTX PRO 5500 graphics card production is expected to be no more than 3 million units in 2027, while total orders from Chinese customers have already exceeded 6 million units.
The RTX PRO 5500 is positioned for professional workstations, with performance lower than data center chips such as the H200 and B300 used for large-scale AI training and inference. Sources interviewed said Chinese tech companies mainly plan to use it for AI inference, i.e., running already-trained models and generating responses. As higher-performance chips continue to face export restrictions and domestic AI computing power supply remains tight, alternative products that were originally less attractive are becoming more popular.
On the supply side, NVIDIA expects to provide early samples of the RTX PRO 5500 in December and begin commercial delivery in the first quarter of 2027. However, starting in 2027, NVIDIA is expected to allocate most of TSMC's capacity to its next-generation Rubin data center platform, potentially further limiting supply of this graphics card. This round of orders highlights that China's AI computing power demand remains strong under U.S. export controls, and also reflects the supply-demand gap faced by compliant alternative chips.