By Hamza Faisal
China's biggest technology companies are staging a run on Nvidia's chips — not by smuggling restricted hardware, but by placing the largest above-board orders the company has seen in years. ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million of Nvidia's new RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, worth over $35 billion at list price, in a rush for legal, export-compliant silicon amid Washington's tightening restrictions, Reuters reported on October 20, citing two people familiar with the matter.
There is just one problem: Nvidia does not have the cards to sell them. The US chipmaker has told customers and partners it cannot guarantee it can fill the orders, because demand from Chinese technology companies far exceeds planned production. One source told Reuters that partners might receive only 5% to 10% of the quantities they asked for.
The math that breaks the order book
At roughly $11,400 apiece, the three giants' combined orders carry a potential value above $35 billion — but even that figure understates the real frenzy. One person familiar with the matter said Nvidia indicated it could produce no more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 cards globally in 2027, while total orders from customers in China have already exceeded 6 million, according to two of the sources.
The scramble reflects a simple reality: this is a workstation chip, designed for powerful professional computers rather than the giant data-center clusters that use Nvidia's most advanced AI processors. But it is among the most powerful Nvidia products that Chinese customers are still legally allowed to buy. The Blackwell-based B300 data-center chip is barred from sale to Chinese buyers under US export controls, and exports of the older Hopper-based H200 are reviewed case-by-case under licensing conditions.
According to the sources, the companies want the RTX PRO 5500 mainly for AI inference — running models that have already been trained — a use case that sits comfortably inside the export rules.
Demand has a way of leaking out anyway
The appetite has only grown as the restrictions dragged on and computing capacity stayed scarce. The RTX PRO 5500's predecessor, the RTX 6000D, has been discontinued, and one source said its market price in China has doubled.
The pressure is also surfacing in public filings. 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 concrete data point that matches the scale of the private rush Reuters' sources describe.
The scale of the orders, which Reuters says have not been previously reported, underscores an uncomfortable truth for Washington's export-control strategy: the restrictions have not reduced China's appetite for Nvidia hardware. They have simply rerouted it into whatever the company is still allowed to sell — and right now, there is far more demand for those legal chips than Nvidia can build.
By Hamza Faisal
