Chinese tech giants place over $35 billion in Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 orders

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have placed orders for more than 3 million Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, a deal worth over $35 billion at roughly $11,400 per unit. The chips are workstation-class devices that comply with U.S. export rules, unlike Nvidia’s Blackwell-based B300 and Hopper-based H200 chips, which face bans or case-by-case licensing. Nvidia told partners it may only fulfill 5-10% of the requested quantities and indicated a global production ceiling of 3 million units by 2027.

The Chinese firms plan to use the cards for AI inference, a less compute-intensive task than model training, underscoring persistent appetite for Nvidia hardware despite restrictions. Supply constraints are expected to worsen as Nvidia redirects capacity to its next-generation Rubin platform at TSMC. The orders illustrate how U.S. curbs are reshaping China’s AI compute landscape and driving firms toward export-compliant yet costly alternatives.