With a Reuters source putting Nvidia's 2027 output at no more than 3 million cards, allocation decisions will set how much inference capacity China's largest platforms add next year.
ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million of Nvidia’s new RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, at a combined sticker price above US$35 billion, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke to Reuters. The report, carried in full by Business Standard, puts the price at about US$11,400 per card and says total orders from Chinese customers now exceed 6 million cards. Reuters gave no breakdown by company.
The size of the order matters less than how much of it Nvidia can deliver. Nvidia has told customers it cannot guarantee it will fill the orders, and one of Reuters’ sources said partners were warned they might receive only 5% to 10% of the quantities requested. Another said Nvidia could make no more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 cards worldwide in 2027, as it moves much of its TSMC capacity to its next platform, Rubin.
ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent, the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security and China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment, and TSMC declined to comment.
A workstation card has become China’s main route to new Nvidia hardware
The RTX PRO 5500 is a workstation product, less powerful than Nvidia’s H200 and B300 data-center chips. Reuters said product specifications it saw put the card close to the RTX 6000D, a reduced-capability model Nvidia built to meet US export restrictions and has since discontinued; one source said the 6000D’s market price in China has doubled. US rules bar the B300 from Chinese buyers, while H200 exports are reviewed case by case under licensing conditions.
Nvidia lists the card with its Blackwell architecture, 84GB of GDDR7 memory, roughly 1.4 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth and power draw of up to 600 watts. Asia Times reported that the card was launched on September 14 and uses the GB202 graphics processor, with 21,760 cores, the same count as the consumer GeForce RTX 5090. Chinese buyers want it mainly for inference, the work of running trained models for users.
Domestic pricing has already moved. Yicai reported a pre-sale listing in China at 89,999 yuan per card, with market estimates of 80,000 to 120,000 yuan, and noted that Nvidia positions the product as a professional desktop card with no announced server version.
Beijing’s approval sits alongside its push for homegrown chips
The orders follow reports in late September that Beijing was preparing to let its largest platforms buy the card. The Next Web, citing The Information, reported that MIIT asked companies including ByteDance and Alibaba how many cards they planned to buy and for what purpose, and told some of them it intended to approve the purchases. Neither Beijing nor the companies has confirmed this publicly.
Approval would sit uneasily with Beijing’s encouragement of domestic chips. Reuters noted that Huawei in particular has gained market share, although Chinese chipmakers have generally struggled to match leading American products. Nvidia used its response to criticize both governments, telling Reuters that US firms are held back by "outdated US export controls" and by China’s own limit on US imports, and that Chinese workstation-chip producers have grown rapidly since 2022. EastFrontier has tracked how Huawei’s advance presses Nvidia’s China lead.
The three platforms are not the only buyers. Shenzhen-listed Tansun Technology said in an October 13 filing that it had agreed to buy 20,000 RTX PRO 5500 cards from an unidentified counterparty, warning that supply shortages and overseas technology controls could delay deliveries or cut volumes. Yicai estimated that order at 1.6 billion to 2.4 billion yuan.
Samples in December will show how much Nvidia can ship
Nvidia has told customers to expect early samples in December and commercial deliveries in the first quarter of 2027, according to Reuters. Earlier reporting from The Information, cited by Asia Times, suggested ByteDance alone was considering about 1 million units and that Nvidia planned to ship roughly 500,000 cards a quarter to China from late December. The new figures show demand running well ahead of that pace.
Chinese customers have ordered more than 6 million RTX PRO 5500 cards in total, twice the 3 million that one person said Nvidia could produce worldwide in 2027. If allocations land near the 5% to 10% range Nvidia reportedly signaled, the three platforms would receive a small fraction of the cards they asked for, and the remaining demand would fall to domestic suppliers such as Huawei or to whatever other products Washington allows.
Two signals will settle the question: a formal statement from Beijing on the purchases, and the size of the first deliveries in early 2027. Either would show whether the RTX PRO 5500 becomes a meaningful part of China’s inference buildout or remains mostly an order book.