Reuters: Chinese tech giants order over 6 million downgraded Nvidia AI GPUs, far exceeding next year's total capacity
Reuters reports Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent ordered over 6 million RTX PRO 5500s, but with limited capacity, actual delivery may be only 5% to 10%.
According to Reuters, major Chinese technology companies including Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent have placed orders for more than 6 million RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards from Nvidia. At the suggested retail price, the total value of these orders is approximately $35 billion. These GPUs are intended for artificial intelligence inference tasks rather than gaming.
However, Nvidia faces a severe production bottleneck. Citing sources, Reuters reported that Nvidia's maximum output for 2027 will be only 3 million units, covering global demand across all customers. This means that even if all orders are valid, the actual delivery volume to Chinese firms could represent just 5% to 10% of their requested quantities.
This massive demand for downgraded GPUs stems from US export control policies. US President Donald Trump has banned the export of Nvidia's most powerful GB102 and GB112 chips to China. Previously, Nvidia introduced the restricted RTX PRO 6000D specifically for the Chinese market, but production was halted after the Chinese government refused to import "second-tier" chips that had passed through US security checks. Currently, the RTX PRO 5500 remains one of the few models exempt from the ban that can partially meet AI inference needs.
For AI industry investors, the stark gap between the sheer scale of these orders and Nvidia's hard production ceiling highlights how geopolitical friction distorts the global AI infrastructure supply chain, significantly driving up the time cost and uncertainty of acquiring compute power.