ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent Ordered Over $35 Billion of Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 Cards, Sources Say

Three of China's biggest tech companies want far more of Nvidia's legal-to-export graphics cards than Nvidia plans to build.

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million of Nvidia's new RTX PRO 5500 cards, with a collective sticker price of over $35 billion, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters in an exclusive published today, Oct. 20. The sources spoke anonymously because they are not authorized to speak to the media. Neither Nvidia nor the three companies has confirmed the figures on the record.

The numbers

The cards are priced at about $11,400 each, according to two of the sources. At that price, $35 billion works out to roughly 3.1 million cards, which fits the "more than 3 million" figure.

Sticker price is a list-value calculation. It is not a payment or a signed contract, and no source says the money has changed hands.

Total orders from Chinese customers have topped 6 million units, according to two of the sources. That means the three named companies account for roughly half of the Chinese demand.

Nvidia says it can't fill them

Nvidia has told customers and partners it cannot guarantee it can fill the orders, because Chinese demand "far exceeds planned production," the two sources and a third person familiar with the matter said.

One source said partners were told they might receive only 5% to 10% of the quantities they requested. Another said Nvidia indicated it could produce no more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 cards worldwide in 2027.

Our arithmetic: if the 5% to 10% allocation applied to a 3 million-card order, that would be 150,000 to 300,000 cards. At sticker price, that is about $1.7 billion to $3.4 billion, a small fraction of the headline figure.

According to the sources, Nvidia has advised customers to expect early samples in December and commercial deliveries in the first quarter of 2027.

Why this card

The RTX PRO 5500 is a workstation GPU built for professional desktop systems, not the large data-center clusters that run Nvidia's top AI processors. It uses the same number of CUDA cores as the flagship GeForce RTX 5090 and carries 84GB of GDDR7 memory, which makes it attractive for AI work.

It is less powerful than the chips Washington has locked down. Under current U.S. export controls, Nvidia's Blackwell-based B300 data-center chip cannot be sold to Chinese buyers. Exports of the Hopper-based H200 are reviewed case by case and come with licensing conditions.

The RTX PRO 5500 is not restricted, so it sits among the most powerful Nvidia chips Chinese buyers can still get.

Nvidia's position

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said U.S. restrictions cut the company's share of China's AI data-center chip market from a near monopoly to effectively nothing. The size of these orders suggests Nvidia still has a sizeable potential market in China through lesser products.

An Nvidia spokesman told Reuters that U.S. firms "continue to be restricted by a combination of outdated U.S. export controls, which cover gaming products released nearly half a decade ago, and China's own limits on U.S. imports." In Nvidia's telling, the rules have not kept pace with its product lines, and Beijing is a constraint too.

The domestic alternative

Washington's curbs have pushed Chinese firms toward domestic suppliers, and Beijing has encouraged the use of homegrown chips. Huawei in particular has gained market share. Chinese chipmakers have generally struggled to match leading American products, partly because separate restrictions limit their access to the foreign equipment used to make the most advanced semiconductors.

The surge in demand also shows how much U.S. restrictions have tightened computing-power supplies in the world's second-largest economy. Chinese companies are racing to build cutting-edge AI models and to support Beijing's push to deploy the technology across its industries.

What comes next

The U.S. line sits between the banned B300 and a workstation card that Chinese firms are ordering by the million. The Commerce Department has not said whether it plans any change to the thresholds that make the RTX PRO 5500 exportable.

Nvidia has not confirmed the order sizes or the allocation plan publicly. The first concrete test is December, when early samples are expected, followed by commercial deliveries in the first quarter of 2027.