With only tens of thousands of RTX Pro 5500 cards due by February, Chinese cloud groups will keep leaning on Huawei, Cambricon and T-Head for inference capacity through 2027.
Chinese technology companies have ordered about 6 million of Nvidia’s RTX Pro 5500 chips but expect to receive "some tens of thousands, or roughly 1%," over the next four months, Bloomberg reported on November 4, citing people familiar with the matter. Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance are among the buyers. At more than US$11,000 a chip, the orders are worth about US$70 billion.
The delivery schedule is thin. A first batch of several thousand cards is expected by the end of 2026, followed by tens of thousands around February, and those are the only confirmed shipments so far, according to Bloomberg. Nvidia declined to comment on shipment numbers and has warned customers that capacity will stay limited for the foreseeable future, citing conflicts in its product scheduling.
Bloomberg’s count of about 6 million covers the wider group of Chinese AI and cloud buyers. Reuters reported in October that Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance alone had ordered more than 3 million cards and that total Chinese orders had passed 6 million, a story EastFrontier covered when the three companies’ orders passed US$35 billion. Reuters’ sources said then that some buyers might receive only 5% to 10% of what they asked for, with samples in December and commercial deliveries from the first quarter of 2027. The new report puts the first months of that schedule in sharper focus: about 1% within four months.
A workstation card became China’s most sought-after Nvidia product
The RTX Pro 5500 is a workstation graphics card, not one of Nvidia’s data-center accelerators. It has the same number of CUDA cores, Nvidia’s basic processing units, as the flagship RTX 5090 gaming card, and carries 84GB of GDDR7 memory, which makes it useful for AI work, Tom’s Hardware reported. Bloomberg said the card is not powerful enough to fall under the US rules that bar Nvidia’s most capable accelerators from China.
Beijing’s stance has also shifted. The Information reported in September that the Chinese government might allow companies such as Alibaba and ByteDance to buy the RTX Pro 5500, according to Bloomberg. EastFrontier reported at the time that the signal left ByteDance and Alibaba waiting for clarity on volumes, and the new delivery estimates show that supply, more than permission, is now the constraint.
Nvidia also pointed to policy in its statement to Bloomberg, saying that US companies "continue to be restricted by a combination of outdated US export controls," and Tom’s Hardware reported that the statement also cited "China’s own limits on U.S. imports."
Rubin is taking the factory capacity that China wants
The shortage has a manufacturing cause. Nvidia relies on TSMC, and both companies are allocating more capacity to next-generation products such as the Rubin data-center platform, so RTX Pro 5500 supply is expected to stay tight, Bloomberg reported.
Chinese hyperscalers estimate they could receive roughly 700,000 RTX Pro 5500 cards by the end of 2027, less than an eighth of what they ordered. That figure comes from one person citing a key buyer’s internal calculations, and Bloomberg said final volumes could change as Nvidia increases production.
Domestic suppliers are the alternative, but they face their own limits. Chinese cloud groups are likely to keep turning to inference chips from Huawei, Cambricon and Alibaba’s T-Head, according to Bloomberg. Huawei raised prices for its most advanced accelerators by about 60% around September, and US curbs on chipmaking equipment plus a prolonged shortage of high-bandwidth memory restrict how many chips Chinese makers can produce. Cambricon’s latest results highlighted those production limits, Bloomberg reported.
The first deliveries will test the order book
The batch of several thousand cards due by the end of December is the first concrete check on the reports. If it arrives on schedule, the February shipment of tens of thousands becomes the next marker; if it slips, Chinese buyers will have spent most of a year ordering a product they cannot deploy at scale.
Two further signals matter for investors. One is whether Nvidia reports any China revenue from the RTX Pro 5500 in its coming quarterly results, which would show the shipments are real. The other is whether Huawei, Cambricon or T-Head announce capacity increases or further price changes, since every card Nvidia cannot deliver adds to demand for their accelerators.