Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 Orders From China Hit $70B, Only 1% to Ship

Chinese tech companies have ordered about 6 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 graphics cards worth roughly $70 billion, but they expect to receive only about 1% of them in the next four months. Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance are among the buyers, according to a Bloomberg report published on November 4 that cites people familiar with the matter.

The people told Bloomberg the companies are planning for only some tens of thousands of cards in that window, as Nvidia struggles to raise production fast enough to meet demand. Neither Nvidia nor the buyers have confirmed the order figures.

Why China wants the Nvidia RTX Pro 5500

The RTX Pro 5500 is a workstation card, not a data center accelerator. That matters because US export controls block sales of Nvidia’s Blackwell B300 to Chinese buyers, while the older H200 needs a case-by-case license. The RTX Pro 5500 falls outside those limits, which makes it one of the most powerful Nvidia chips Chinese firms can still buy.

On paper it is a serious AI card. Nvidia’s product page lists a Blackwell GPU with 84GB of GDDR7 memory with ECC, 1,398GB/s of bandwidth, PCIe 5.0 and power draw of up to 600W, and calls the specifications preliminary. Board partner PNY lists 21,760 CUDA cores, the same count as the consumer GeForce RTX 5090. Chinese buyers mainly want it for AI inference, the work of running trained models to answer chatbot queries, which needs less computing power than training.

Demand is far above what Nvidia can build

The gap was already visible in October. Reuters reported on October 20 that ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent alone had ordered more than 3 million cards at about $11,400 each, a sticker value above $35 billion. According to that report, Nvidia told partners it might fill only 5% to 10% of requests and could produce no more than 3 million RTX Pro 5500 cards worldwide in 2027. Early samples were expected in December, with commercial deliveries starting in the first quarter of 2027.

Bloomberg’s 1% figure covers a shorter window and suggests the squeeze is tighter than first expected. Nvidia is also reportedly shifting much of its TSMC capacity toward Rubin, its next data center platform, which leaves less room for workstation parts.

The China story keeps getting more complicated for Nvidia. Earlier this week the Financial Times reported that Nvidia told cloud clients at least 51% of their services must go to non-Chinese firms, and the company is also dealing with a spy report linked to Jensen Huang’s circle.

What it means for everyone else

Workstation and gaming cards share the same Blackwell silicon, so heavy AI demand tends to spill over into retail prices. That is already happening in the US, where the RTX 5090 price hit $9,400 in October. If Chinese buyers keep chasing every export-compliant card they can find, supply of high-end Nvidia GPUs is unlikely to ease soon.