Nvidia cannot guarantee $35 billion of Chinese RTX PRO 5500 orders

The orders and the shortfall

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent ordered more than 3 million Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 cards, worth over $35 billion at about $11,400 each, Reuters reported on 20 October, citing two people familiar with the matter. Nvidia has told customers and partners it cannot guarantee it will fill the orders because Chinese demand far exceeds planned production.

One source said partners might receive only 5% to 10% of the quantities they requested. Another said Nvidia could make no more than 3 million of the cards worldwide in 2027, while total orders from Chinese customers have passed 6 million, two sources said. The three companies' orders alone therefore exceed Nvidia's projected global output for 2027.

An Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters that US firms remain restricted by "outdated U.S. export controls, which cover gaming products released nearly a half a decade ago", and by China's own limits on US imports.

Nvidia has not confirmed the order or production figures, and its recent 8-K filings do not disclose them.

Why a workstation card carries the demand

The RTX PRO 5500 is a workstation card built for professional machines, not a data-centre processor. US export controls bar sales of Nvidia's Blackwell-based B300 to China, and H200 exports are reviewed case by case. The RTX PRO 5500 is still among the most powerful Nvidia chips Chinese buyers can legally get.

The three companies plan to use the cards mainly for inference, running trained models to answer chatbot requests, which needs less computing power than training. The older RTX 6000D drew little interest. Nvidia has stopped making that cut-down card and its price in China has doubled, one source said, as hopes that Washington would allow stronger chips faded. Shenzhen-listed Tansun Technology said in a 13 October filing that it would buy 20,000 RTX PRO 5500 cards, without naming the seller.

What Nvidia says, and what the market did

Nvidia's current-quarter guidance of $108.0 billion, plus or minus 2%, excludes any China data-centre compute revenue. An Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters that Chinese makers of workstation chips and cards have seen "unprecedented growth since 2022", the year the curbs began. Jensen Huang has said the restrictions cut Nvidia's share of China's AI data-centre chip market from a near monopoly to effectively nothing.

The stock barely moved. Nvidia closed on 20 October at $216.47, down 0.29%, after a 5.27% decline in the week through that date.

TSMC capacity is another constraint. Two sources expect Nvidia to give much of its capacity at the chipmaker to Rubin, its next data-centre platform, from 2027.

What happens next

Nvidia has told customers to expect early samples in December, with commercial deliveries from the first quarter of 2027. No RTX PRO 5500 shipments are expected in the quarter Nvidia reports next. Nvidia posts earnings on 18 November, and any confirmed China shipments would sit outside the guidance it has given.