ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have placed orders for more than 3 million NVIDIA RTX PRO 5500 GPUs, with total order value exceeding $35 billion.

According to Reuters, ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have ordered over 3 million NVIDIA RTX PRO 5500 workstation graphics cards. At an approximate price of $11,400 per card, the total order value exceeds $35 billion. This chip complies with U.S. export control requirements and is one of NVIDIA’s high-performance chips still available for purchase by Chinese buyers. Due to Chinese tech firms’ demand far outstripping NVIDIA’s planned production capacity, the company has informed clients and partners that it cannot guarantee full delivery. Sources say NVIDIA may only meet 5% to 10% of the requested quantity, and global production of RTX PRO 5500 cards is projected to not exceed 3 million units by 2027, while Chinese clients’ total orders have already surpassed 6 million units. The RTX PRO 5500 is targeted at professional workstations, with performance lower than data center chips like the H200 and B300 used for large-scale AI training and inference. Sources add that Chinese tech firms primarily plan to use these cards for AI inference—running trained models to generate outputs. As higher-performance chips remain subject to export restrictions and domestic AI computing power supplies are tight, alternative products that were previously less appealing are growing in popularity. On the supply side, NVIDIA is expected to provide early samples of the RTX PRO 5500 in December, with commercial delivery starting in the first quarter of 2027. However, starting in 2027, NVIDIA plans to allocate most of TSMC’s production capacity to its next-generation Rubin data center platform, which may further limit the supply of this graphics card. This round of orders highlights the continued strong demand for AI computing power in China amid U.S. export controls, and also reflects the supply-demand gap facing compliant alternative chips.