Nvidia set to fill ~1% of China's $70B RTX Pro 5500 order

Chinese AI and cloud firms have booked roughly 6 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 cards, a ~$70 billion order at about $11,400 apiece, but Bloomberg reports they expect to receive only about 1% of that within four months. Nvidia has told partners "it can only fulfill 5-10% of the requested volume," against a global production cap of "no more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 cards globally throughout 2027."

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent alone account for more than 3 million units, a sticker value above $35 billion, according to earlier reporting by TrendForce. The RTX Pro 5500 is a Blackwell-based workstation GPU with 21,760 CUDA cores and 84GB of GDDR7 memory. The reporting notes the part is "not powerful enough to fall under those restrictions, and it ranks among the best AI chips available in China."

Washington bars Nvidia's top data-center parts like the Blackwell B300 from Chinese buyers outright, and the older H200 moves only under case-by-case licenses. That leaves the RTX Pro 5500, by the same reporting, as among the best Nvidia silicon still legally available in China, which is why orders have run so far ahead of what the fab network can deliver.

The squeeze is the backdrop for a run of related alerts this week, including Oracle scrapping a $7B five-year Tencent AI chip lease and Nvidia itself leaning on OpenAI and think tanks to shape chip export rules; we've tracked 319 chip stories in the last 90 days on our chips feed.