Chinese technology giants including ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million Nvidia graphics cards, according to a report, a volume worth more than 47 trillion won. Reuters said the orders show undiminished Chinese demand for Nvidia hardware despite U.S. restrictions.
Reuters reported on the 20th, citing two people familiar with the matter, that the three companies had ordered a combined total of more than 3 million units of Nvidia's RTX PRO 5500 graphics card. The product costs about $11,400 (about 15 million won) per unit, putting the total at more than $35 billion (about 47 trillion won), the people said.
The RTX PRO 5500, a graphics card designed for personal computers, has specifications similar to the RTX 6000D, which Nvidia built with reduced performance in the middle of last year to comply with U.S. export controls. With Washington restricting exports of Nvidia's most advanced chips to China, Chinese buyers have turned to lower-performance chips as a second-best option. The Blackwell-based B300 chip, used mainly in artificial intelligence data centers, is barred from sale in China, and the Hopper-based H200 requires approval for each export. Chinese companies are in fact acquiring the RTX PRO 5500 for AI inference rather than for use in personal computers, the people said. Inference requires less computing power than training a model on vast amounts of data, meaning it can be run without the most advanced chips.
As recently as last year, the RTX 6000D drew little interest from Chinese buyers, who considered it too expensive for its performance. It was discontinued little more than a year after its release, but its price inside China has since more than doubled, according to the people. With no clear end in sight for U.S. export controls and a persistent shortage of AI computing power, the RTX PRO 5500 has emerged as an attractive substitute given its similarity to the RTX 6000D. Including the 3 million units confirmed in this case, orders placed by Chinese companies for the RTX PRO 5500 have surpassed 6 million units, the people said.
The problem is that supply cannot keep up with the surge in demand. Nvidia's RTX PRO 5500 output in 2027 will reach at most about 3 million units. The company has told customers that it can deliver only about 5% to 10% of their ordered volumes, according to the report. Part of the gap reflects the sharp jump in demand, but it also stems from shifting priorities on Nvidia's production lines. From 2027, Nvidia is expected to allocate a substantial portion of its production capacity at Taiwan's TSMC to Rubin, its next-generation advanced chip for large-scale data centers, rather than to products such as the RTX PRO 5500.