Reports: Chinese Tech Giants Order 3 Million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 GPUs Worth $35 Billion
ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent reportedly ordered $35 billion in compliant Nvidia GPUs, but supply may only meet 5-10% of demand.
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According to reports by Tom's Hardware citing Reuters, Chinese technology giants ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have placed orders for more than 3 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 workstation GPUs, totaling approximately $35 billion. These cards are fully compliant with U.S. restrictions on exports of AI-capable GPUs to China, making them a critical resource for Chinese firms seeking compute power.
However, this order volume far exceeds Nvidia's planned production for the RTX Pro 5500. Sources indicated that Nvidia has informed customers it can likely fulfill only 5% to 10% of the demand. The RTX Pro 5500 features the same number of CUDA cores as the flagship consumer RTX 5090 but includes 84GB of GDDR7 memory, suitable for AI applications. While less powerful than banned or restricted enterprise AI chips like the H200 and B300, it remains indispensable under current geopolitical conditions.
An Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters that demand from the Chinese market for these chips has seen "unprecedented growth since 2022" following the introduction of export controls. Neither Nvidia nor the three Chinese companies have publicly confirmed the specific order volumes or values on the record.