Byte, Alibaba, and Tencent have ordered over 3 million Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards.

October 20 — According to a Reuters report, ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million NVIDIA RTX PRO 5500 workstation graphics cards, with each card priced at approximately $11,400, bringing the total order value to over $35 billion. This chip complies with U.S. export control regulations to China and is currently one of the high-performance NVIDIA chips that Chinese buyers can still purchase. Due to demand from Chinese tech companies far exceeding NVIDIA’s planned production capacity, the company has informed customers and partners that it cannot guarantee full delivery of the orders. Sources indicate that NVIDIA may only be able to meet 5% to 10% of customer demand, and the global production of RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards is not expected to exceed 3 million units by 2027, while total orders from Chinese customers have already surpassed 6 million units. The RTX PRO 5500 is positioned for professional workstations and performs below data center chips like the H200 and B300, which are used for large-scale AI training and inference. According to sources interviewed, Chinese tech companies mainly plan to use them for AI inference — that is, running trained models and generating responses. With higher-performance chips continuously subject to export restrictions and the limited supply of domestic AI computing power, alternative products that were previously less attractive are now becoming more popular. On the supply side, NVIDIA expects to provide early samples of the RTX PRO 5500 in December and to start commercial deliveries in the first quarter of 2027. However, starting in 2027, NVIDIA plans to allocate most of TSMC’s production capacity to the next-generation Rubin data center platform, which could further limit the supply of this graphics card. This round of orders highlights the continued strong demand for AI computing power in China under U.S. export controls and also reflects the supply-demand gap faced by compliant alternative chips.