Chinese tech giants ordered about 6 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 chips worth roughly $70 billion, but they will receive only about 1 percent of that volume within four months, Bloomberg reported on November 4.
Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and other Chinese AI and cloud companies now expect to receive only tens of thousands of cards, a sliver of the millions they requested. The first several thousand chips are expected by the end of this year, with another batch of tens of thousands arriving around February 2027, Bloomberg’s reporting detailed.
A Workstation Card, Bought at Datacenter Scale
The RTX Pro 5500 is, on paper, a workstation graphics card built for professional visual work. In practice, Chinese buyers want it for AI inference, the stage where a trained model answers queries rather than learning new ones, because it is among the most powerful Nvidia products still export-compliant for China.
Nvidia’s Blackwell-based B300 datacenter chip remains barred from sale to China under US export controls. The RTX Pro 5500 sits on the permitted side of that line, and at more than $11,000 apiece, the Chinese orders would be worth about $70 billion at list prices.
Why the Gap Is So Wide
Supply, not sanctions, is the binding constraint. Nvidia estimates global production capacity for the card in 2027 at just 3 million units, and Chinese orders alone come to more than double that cap, before anyone else in the world gets a turn.
Nvidia has told its partners it cannot guarantee the orders will be filled, and the company reportedly favors its next-generation platforms when allocating commercial-shipment capacity, which could leave even less room for the RTX Pro 5500. Earlier reporting had estimated Chinese clients might receive 5 to 10 percent of what they requested; Bloomberg’s 1 percent figure points to an even tighter squeeze.
The scale-up itself was sudden. An October 20 Reuters exclusive put orders from ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent alone at more than 3 million units worth about $35 billion, at roughly $11,400 per card. Total orders from all Chinese customers have since reportedly topped 6 million units, outpacing Nvidia’s planned production.
Why It Matters
Two years of export controls were meant to wall China off from Nvidia. Instead, the RTX Pro 5500 China orders show Chinese tech giants buying the company’s workstation GPUs at datacenter scale, and supply cannot keep up. The episode proves that even products cleared by export rules face a second filter: factory capacity and how Nvidia chooses to divide it.
The next checkpoints are concrete. Sample units are expected in December 2026, with production and commercial shipments starting in the first quarter of 2027, milestones that will show whether deliveries land closer to Bloomberg’s 1 percent or the earlier 5 to 10 percent range.
Sources
- Crypto Briefing (citing Bloomberg): Nvidia allocates 1% of $70B RTX chip order to China clients (Nov 4, 2026)
- Seoul Economic Daily (citing Bloomberg): Nvidia to Fill Just 1% of Chinese Chip Orders Amid Supply Crunch (Nov 4, 2026)
- AIAffairs (citing Bloomberg): Chinese Nvidia buyers expect 1% delivery on $70 billion chip orders (Nov 4, 2026)
