Overview
- On Tuesday, ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent reportedly ordered more than 3 million of Nvidia’s RTX PRO 5500 cards with a combined list value above $35 billion, according to people familiar with the deals.
- Nvidia has told partners it may only produce roughly 3 million RTX PRO 5500 units worldwide in 2027 and warned some buyers could receive as little as 5% to 10% of the quantities they requested.
- The RTX PRO 5500 is a workstation‑class GPU that complies with current U.S. export rules and is one of the most powerful Nvidia chips still legally available to Chinese customers.
- Chinese firms plan to use the cards mainly for AI inference, meaning they will run trained models for services like chatbots rather than perform the highest‑intensity model training.
- U.S. export controls that bar Nvidia’s Blackwell B300 and restrict H200 sales have concentrated demand on allowed workstation chips and pushed Chinese companies toward domestic accelerators, a trend that could reshape procurement and deployment strategies.