Chinese AI and cloud companies including Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance have ordered about 6 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 chips worth roughly $70 billion, but expect to receive only about 1% of that volume within the next four months, according to reports published Wednesday. Each chip costs more than $11,000.
The new total is double an earlier reported figure of about $35 billion for more than 3 million GPUs. Estimates of near-term deliveries vary between reports, from about 10,000 chips to roughly 60,000, but all put the share at around 1% of what was ordered. Chinese developers expect a first batch of several thousand units by the end of 2026, and had been counting on about 700,000 chips by the end of 2027.
The RTX Pro 5500 is a workstation GPU with the same number of CUDA cores as the RTX 5090 and 84GB of GDDR7 memory. Its draw in China is its export status: it falls outside the US restrictions that block sales of the RTX 5090, H200 and B300 to Chinese buyers, which makes it one of the most capable AI chips Chinese companies can legally buy.
Key facts
- 01Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and others ordered about 6 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 chips worth roughly $70 billion.
- 02Buyers expect to receive only about 1% of that volume within the next four months.
- 03Each chip costs more than $11,000 and carries 84GB of GDDR7 memory; it sits outside US export limits.
- 04Chinese developers had expected about 700,000 units by the end of 2027.
- 05Nvidia cited production schedule conflicts as it shifts capacity toward its next-generation Rubin chips.
Nvidia has told customers its supply will be limited for now because of production schedule conflicts. As Nvidia and TSMC move capacity toward next-generation Rubin products, RTX Pro 5500 supply is expected to stay tight. With global capacity constrained, Nvidia is also prioritizing higher-performance, higher-margin chips for customers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Nvidia has also reportedly halted production of the RTX 5090, its top consumer graphics card, to focus on its AI-focused enterprise business.
Nvidia declined to comment on shipment numbers. In a statement, the company said that "U.S. companies remain constrained by outdated American export controls that cover even gaming products nearly five years old, compounded by China's own restrictions on U.S. imports." Nvidia has spent years lobbying the US government to allow more chip sales to China.
If the shortage persists, Chinese firms are likely to lean more on domestic inference chips from Huawei, Cambricon and T-Head, according to the Seoul Economic Daily. Those suppliers face their own limits: US restrictions on advanced equipment and a prolonged high-bandwidth memory shortage are cutting output and raising prices. Cambricon flagged production constraints in its latest earnings, and Huawei raised prices on its top-tier accelerators by 60% in September.
The delivery gap lands the same day Oracle reportedly canceled an estimated $7 billion lease that would have given Tencent access to about 100,000 advanced AI chips in Southeast Asia, after US officials raised concerns about the deal.
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