Tech & AI
ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent order more than $35 billion of Nvidia's China-compliant RTX Pro 5500 cards, Reuters reports
The orders far exceed what Nvidia can make, with some buyers told they may get as little as 5% to 10% of the volume they asked for.
HedgeWeekly Tech & AI Desk ·
China's three largest internet groups, ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent, have ordered more than 3 million of Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 graphics cards, worth over $35 billion in total, Reuters reported late on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Two of the sources put the price at about $11,400 per card. Neither Nvidia nor the three buyers confirmed the figures on the record.
The RTX Pro 5500 is a workstation card built on Nvidia's Blackwell design with 84GB of memory. It falls within current US export rules, unlike Nvidia's more powerful H200 and B300 data-centre chips, which are banned or tightly restricted for Chinese buyers. Reports say the Chinese groups mainly want the cards for inference, the work of running AI models that have already been trained.
Demand is running well ahead of supply. According to the reports, Nvidia has told customers it cannot fill the orders, and some buyers were warned they could receive only 5% to 10% of what they requested. Nvidia can make about 3 million of the cards worldwide in 2027, and commercial shipments are expected to start in early 2027 as the company shifts capacity toward its next-generation Rubin platform. A Nvidia spokesman told Reuters that Chinese demand has grown sharply since 2022, and blamed outdated US export controls and China's own import limits for holding US firms back.
Why it matters: China had shrunk to a minor part of Nvidia's data-centre business under US export curbs, so a compliant product with this level of demand points to a possible new revenue stream from 2027. The binding limit is supply, not demand, which means investors should watch how much of the order book Nvidia actually ships, how it rations capacity between this card and Rubin, and whether Washington or Beijing moves to tighten rules on the product.