Chinese Tech Firms Order $35 Billion Nvidia GPUs

Nvidia’s RTX Pro 5500 chip. (Photo courtesy of Nvidia) Reuters reported on Oct. 20 (local time), citing three sources who requested anonymity, that three major Chinese technology companies, including ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent, have ordered more than 3 million units of Nvidia’s RTX PRO 5500, which is not subject to United States export controls. The price per unit is $11,400, and the total amount reaches $35 billion. The RTX PRO 5500 is not a high-performance artificial intelligence (AI) processor for large-scale data centers, but a professional workstation graphics processing unit (GPU). It is currently the most powerful Nvidia product that China can legally purchase while avoiding United States export controls. Sales of Nvidia’s latest Blackwell-based B300 for data centers are completely banned in China, and the Hopper-based H200 can also only be exported to China if a license is obtained through case-by-case review. In this regard, United States President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier this year to allow the export of the H200 to China on the condition of imposing a tariff (toll) equivalent to 25% of the sales amount. There have also been reports that the Chinese government protested this and sent purchase control messages directing its domestic companies not to buy the H200. Reuters interpreted this as demonstrating China’s strong demand for Nvidia products despite the United States export controls on Nvidia’s advanced products. Nvidia reportedly delivered a message that it could only deliver about 5% to 10% of the requested volume. Another source stated that the maximum volume Nvidia can produce in the single year of 2027 is at the level of 3 million units, but the current order volume from China has exceeded 6 million units. Previously, Nvidia Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jensen Huang (pictured) revealed that Nvidia’s market share in the Chinese AI data center semiconductor market, which it once monopolized, had effectively dropped to zero due to United States sanctions. Chinese companies are reportedly planning to utilize the Nvidia chips for AI inference, which derives chatbot responses and more through already trained models. Inference requires relatively less computing power compared to model training. The RTX PRO 5500 has similar performance to the RTX 6000D, which Nvidia produced last year customized for export to China. It appears that Chinese companies had delayed purchases due to the high price relative to performance, waiting for a relaxation of United States sanctions, before ultimately choosing the RTX PRO 5500. However, Reuters expected that the supply of the RTX PRO 5500 would become even more difficult as Nvidia plans to massively shift TSMC’s production capacity from products like the RTX PRO 5500 to its next-generation data center platform, Rubin, starting in 2027.