China’s leading internet groups race to secure millions of compliant AI chips before supply tightens further.
ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have lined up orders for more than 3 million Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, racking up a combined bill exceeding $35bn. The massive rush highlights the relentless appetite among Chinese technology firms for top-tier American hardware, even as Washington continues to tighten trade controls on high-performance semiconductors.
The RTX PRO 5500—a powerful workstation processor—remains one of the most capable Nvidia components Chinese businesses are legally permitted to buy under current export regulations.
However, industry sources report that Nvidia has already warned clients and trade partners that full order fulfilment is unlikely. Driven by unprecedented demand from mainland firms, total orders for the card have eclipsed 6 million units—double the chipmaker’s projected global output of 3 million cards for 2027.
With trade curbs throttling the flow of raw computing power, Chinese enterprises are increasingly turning to home-grown alternatives, such as Huawei. In the interim, firms are deploying workstation GPUs like the RTX PRO 5500 primarily for AI inference—running existing models—which demands considerably less processing capability than training massive neural networks from scratch.
Supply pressures are expected to worsen as Nvidia pivots manufacturing resources at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) toward Rubin, its next-generation platform for large-scale data centres. This strategic redirection will further squeeze production of workstation-class processors. The market reaction is already evident: following the recent discontinuation of the RTX 6000D—another tailored, reduced-capability card—secondary market prices for the remaining inventory in China have doubled.
