- ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent ordered more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 cards at about $11,400 each, and total Chinese orders have passed 6 million, according to Reuters.
- One source said Nvidia can build no more than 3 million of the cards worldwide in 2027, so China alone has ordered twice the year's supply.
- At the 5% to 10% fill rate Nvidia has floated, the three companies would receive 150,000 to 300,000 cards, worth roughly $1.7 billion to $3.4 billion.
ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 cards worth over $35 billion, making China's three largest AI buyers the biggest customers for a chip Nvidia designed to stay inside US export rules, and Nvidia has told them it may deliver as little as 5% to 10% of what they asked for. The orders were reported by Reuters on October 20, citing two people familiar with the matter, at a price of about $11,400 per card.
Chinese demand for the RTX PRO 5500 is twice Nvidia's 2027 output
The RTX PRO 5500 is a rack-mounted Blackwell workstation card with 84GB of GDDR7 memory, and Chinese buyers plan to run it mainly for inference, the work of serving AI models to users. Nvidia has told customers to expect early samples in December and commercial deliveries from the first quarter of 2027, with no guarantee that orders will be filled.
The card exists because the chips Chinese labs want most are off the table. US rules bar sales of the Blackwell-based B300 to China and review the older H200 case by case, which leaves a workstation part with a fraction of the memory bandwidth as the most capable Nvidia product these companies can buy at volume.
| Nvidia chip | Memory | Memory bandwidth | China status |
|---|---|---|---|
| RTX PRO 5500 (Blackwell workstation) | 84GB GDDR7 | 1.4 TB/s | On sale; Beijing reportedly signalled approval in September |
| H200 (Hopper data center) | 141GB HBM3e | 4.8 TB/s | US case-by-case review |
| B300 (Blackwell Ultra data center) | 288GB HBM3e | 8 TB/s | Barred by US export rules |
Source: Nvidia product specifications; Reuters, October 20, 2026. Table: Santage.
“Accelerates agentic AI, physical simulation, and graphics workloads to teams that need workstation power at scale.”
Nvidia, RTX PRO 5500 product page
Rationed supply turns Chinese AI capacity into an allocation contest
A 5% to 10% fill rate means each of the three buyers must plan 2027 capacity around chips it may never receive, which pushes them further toward domestic accelerators such as Alibaba's Zhenwu V900, unveiled in September. Two people told Reuters they expect Nvidia to move much of its TSMC capacity to its Rubin platform from 2027, which would leave even less room for a China-specific workstation card. The scramble follows Tencent's $7 billion lease of 100,000 chips from Oracle and Beijing's own proposed export controls on 23 AI technologies, both signs that each side now treats compute as a rationed strategic asset.
Drag the fill rate to see how many of ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent's 3 million ordered cards arrive, and what they are worth at about $11,400 each.
Nvidia has reportedly floated 5% to 10%. A 100% fill would require Nvidia's entire reported 2027 output.
For Nvidia, which told investors in August that its outlook assumed no China data center revenue, even a rationed share of this order is upside on a business it had written off. The bigger signal is the size of the backlog itself: Chinese companies have committed tens of billions of dollars to a downgraded part they cannot fully receive, which shows that inference demand in China now outruns every source of supply, foreign or domestic.
Santage is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This article is produced in accordance with Santage's Editorial Standards and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.