ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million of Nvidia's new RTX PRO 5500 workstation GPUs, representing a collective sticker price exceeding $35 billion, as Chinese tech giants scramble for export-compliant hardware amid ongoing U.S. trade restrictions, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter.
Nvidia has warned customers and partners that it cannot guarantee fulfillment because Chinese demand vastly outstrips planned production. One source indicated that buyers were informed they might receive only 5% to 10% of their requested quantities, while another noted the company expects to produce no more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 cards globally throughout 2027. Total orders from Chinese customers alone have already surpassed 6 million units, according to the sources. The three tech giants are seeking cards priced at approximately $11,400 each, with Nvidia advising customers to expect early samples in December and commercial deliveries to begin in the first quarter of 2027.
The RTX PRO 5500 is a Blackwell-architecture workstation GPU engineered for high-performance professional systems rather than massive data-center clusters. Built on the same GB202 die as the GeForce RTX 5090, it features roughly 21,760 CUDA cores, 84 GB of GDDR7 ECC memory, and about 1,398 GB/s of bandwidth. Chinese firms primarily intend to deploy the cards for A
