Chips · Oct 20, 2026, 15:09
NVIDIA RTX PRO 5500 Draws $35B China Order It May Not Fill
ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent reportedly ordered over 3 million RTX PRO 5500 cards worth $35 billion, but NVIDIA may fill only 5% to 10% of requests.
Demand for export-compliant cards far outstrips supply.
Illustration (AI-generated)
China, Oct. 20 — ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million NVIDIA RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, with a combined list value above $35 billion, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. NVIDIA has told customers it cannot promise to fill the orders.
The card is a workstation part, not a data center accelerator. It is among the most powerful NVIDIA chips Chinese buyers can still purchase under U.S. export rules, and the three companies plan to use it mainly for inference, the work of running trained models to answer user requests.
The Technical Details
The RTX PRO 5500 is built on NVIDIA's Blackwell architecture and has the same CUDA core count as the consumer GeForce RTX 5090. Its 84 GB of GDDR7, the latest graphics memory standard, gives it room for large AI models. NVIDIA sells it for rack-mounted deployment with air or liquid cooling.
According to Reuters' sources, NVIDIA told partners they might receive only 5% to 10% of the quantities they requested. It has also indicated it can build no more than 3 million of the cards worldwide in 2027, and NVIDIA is expected to give much of its TSMC capacity that year to Rubin, its next data center platform.
