China AI Chip Rush: ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent Order $35B of Nvidia RTX PRO 5500

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have placed orders for more than 3 million Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 workstation cards with a combined sticker price above $35 billion, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing two people familiar with the matter. The order sizes are so large that Nvidia has told customers and partners it cannot guarantee it can fill them, the two sources and a third person said, because demand from Chinese technology companies far exceeds planned production.

The spending spree is a rush for a less powerful but export-compliant chip. Nvidia's Blackwell-based B300 data center chip cannot be sold to Chinese buyers under U.S. export controls, while exports of the Hopper-based H200 are reviewed case by case and carry licensing conditions. The RTX PRO 5500, priced at about $11,400 per card according to the sources, is among the most powerful Nvidia chips still available to Chinese buyers.

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Nvidia faces a structural shortfall against the demand. One source said Nvidia told partners they might receive only 5% to 10% of the quantities requested; another said the company had indicated it could produce no more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 cards globally in 2027, against total Chinese orders that two of the sources put above 6 million. The squeeze reflects both a surge in demand and Nvidia's manufacturing priorities. Starting in 2027, Nvidia is expected to devote much of its capacity at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co to Rubin, its next-generation large-scale data center platform, rather than products like the RTX PRO 5500, two of the sources said.

Chinese customers plan to run these cards primarily for AI inference, the workload that serves trained models to users generating chatbot responses, the three sources said. Inference demands less compute than training, which is where the capacity crunch bites hardest. The insider view matches the outward signs: the RTX PRO 5500 resembles the RTX 6000D in performance, that earlier reduced-capability card has been discontinued, and its market price in China has doubled, one source said.

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Nvidia shares were up 0.33% at $217.81 in Tuesday trading (Yahoo Finance, 2026-10-20), a muted reaction to an order book that the company itself says it cannot satisfy. The pattern is now well trodden. Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang has said the restrictions reduced Nvidia's share of China's AI data-center chip market from a near monopoly to effectively nothing, but the RTX PRO 5500 orders show Nvidia still holds a sizeable potential market in China through less capable products. Domestic suppliers such as Huawei have gained share under Beijing's push for homegrown chips, though Chinese chipmakers generally still struggle to match leading American parts.

The demand is not limited to three giants. In an October 13 filing, Shenzhen-listed fintech and AI-computing services company Tansun Technology said it had agreed to buy 20,000 RTX PRO 5500 cards from an unidentified counterparty, warning that supply shortages, industry demand and overseas technology controls could delay deliveries or reduce volumes. Nvidia has told customers to expect early samples in December, with commercial deliveries starting in the first quarter of 2027.

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The report lands as the export-control regime itself tightens around China's compute buildout, and it carries a direct implication for the AI supply chain: the world's most wanted AI chip now carries an allocation problem, not a demand problem. For hyperscalers and neoclouds buying Nvidia hardware elsewhere, the strategic question is whether the China surge and the Rubin transition push Nvidia to ration its mainstream volume toward large data center customers first. The first concrete checkpoint is December, when early RTX PRO 5500 samples are due and Nvidia's 2027 allocation stance becomes testable against actual orders.

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