China’s three biggest technology companies have ordered more than 3 million of Nvidia’s new RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, a batch with a collective sticker price of more than $35 billion, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing two people familiar with the matter. Nvidia has told customers and partners it cannot guarantee it can fill those orders.
The orders, which had not been previously reported, are a rush for a chip that was never meant to carry this weight. The RTX PRO 5500 is a workstation card, built for powerful professional computers rather than the vast data-center clusters that run Nvidia’s most advanced AI processors. It is on order at this scale for one reason: under U.S. export controls, it is among the most powerful Nvidia chips Chinese buyers can still get.
Demand is double the supply
The arithmetic is stark. Total orders from customers in China have exceeded 6 million cards, two of the sources told Reuters. Nvidia, another source said, has indicated it can produce no more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 cards globally in 2027 — for every buyer in the world, not just China. One source said Nvidia told partners they might receive only 5% to 10% of the quantities they requested.
ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent account for more than half of the Chinese total on their own: more than 3 million cards at about $11,400 each, according to two of the sources, which is where the $35 billion figure comes from. The sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, Reuters said. None of the four companies has publicly confirmed the orders.
Why a workstation card?
U.S. rules draw a hard line at the top of Nvidia’s range. The company’s Blackwell-based B300 data-center chip is not allowed to be sold to Chinese buyers at all, and exports of its older Hopper-based H200 are reviewed on a case-by-case basis and subject to licensing conditions. That leaves the workstation line as the strongest legal route to Nvidia silicon.
According to Reuters’ sources, the companies want the cards mainly for AI inference — running models that have already been trained, the work of answering users rather than building the model in the first place. Inference is where Chinese platforms burn computing power every day, and it can be spread across large numbers of less powerful cards in a way that training the largest models cannot.
Scarcity is already showing
Interest in the card appears to have grown as the restrictions dragged on and computing capacity stayed scarce, Reuters reported. The card’s predecessor, the RTX 6000D, has been discontinued, and one source said its market price in China has doubled — a sign of how tight supply of even the compliant tier has become.
Smaller buyers are visible in the paperwork. Shenzhen-listed Tansun Technology disclosed in an October 13 filing that it had agreed to buy 20,000 RTX PRO 5500 cards from an unnamed seller — a modest number next to the giants’ millions, but the same bet on the same card.
What the orders do — and do not — mean
Analysis: the $35 billion headline measures intent, not hardware delivered. If Nvidia’s own guidance to partners holds, only a fraction of these cards will ship, and the money that actually changes hands will be far smaller. What the orders do establish, on Reuters’ reporting, is demand: three years into tightening U.S. curbs, China’s largest platforms are still organizing their AI plans around Nvidia chips — and are willing to queue for a workstation card, at more than $11,000 apiece, to get them.
Whether that queue shortens will depend on two things no order book can settle: how much capacity Nvidia chooses to allocate to this card in 2027, and whether U.S. export rules move again. For now, the strongest Nvidia chip most Chinese buyers can legally obtain is one designed for a desk-side workstation — and everyone wants more of it than exists.
