Reuters Reports China's Giants Ordered Over $35 Billion in Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 Cards

China's three biggest technology companies have placed orders for more than 3 million of Nvidia's new RTX PRO 5500 workstation graphics cards, with a collective sticker price above $35 billion, Reuters reported on Tuesday, Oct. 20, citing people familiar with the matter. The catch is supply: according to Reuters, Nvidia has told customers and partners it cannot guarantee it can fill the orders, because demand from Chinese technology companies far exceeds planned production.

The figures are reported, not confirmed. Reuters said its sources requested anonymity because they are not authorised to speak to the media, and that ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent did not respond to requests for comment; the United States Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security and China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology did not respond either. Nvidia has not confirmed the order figures. The $35 billion is the list-price value of cards ordered, at about $11,400 per card according to two of the sources — not hardware shipped, and not revenue Nvidia has recognised.

The workaround the export controls left open

The RTX PRO 5500 is a workstation chip, designed for powerful professional computers rather than the large data-centre clusters that run Nvidia's most advanced AI processors, but it is among the most powerful Nvidia chips still available to Chinese buyers, Reuters reported. The products above it are closed off: Nvidia's Blackwell-based B300 data-centre chip is not allowed to be sold to Chinese buyers under United States export controls, while exports of its Hopper-based H200 are reviewed on a case-by-case basis and are subject to licensing conditions. The three companies want the cards mainly for AI inference — running trained models to generate chatbot responses — which generally requires less computing power than training, the sources said. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has said the restrictions reduced Nvidia's share of China's AI data-centre chip market from a near monopoly to effectively nothing; the reported order book suggests a sizeable market remains for the less powerful products that may still be sold.

Chinese buyers did not always want this class of card. Nvidia launched the RTX 6000D in the middle of last year as a reduced-capability product designed to meet the export restrictions, and major Chinese technology firms initially showed little interest, viewing the chips as expensive for their capabilities and hoping Washington would eventually allow sales of more powerful processors, Reuters reported. Those expectations have faded as restrictions stayed in place and computing capacity stayed scarce. The RTX 6000D has since been discontinued, and its market price in China has doubled, one source told Reuters.

A $35 billion order book against a 3 million-card ceiling

The arithmetic is stark. More than 3 million cards at about $11,400 each gives the three giants' orders their reported value above $35 billion. But total orders from customers in China have exceeded 6 million cards, two of the sources said, while another said Nvidia had indicated it could produce no more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 cards globally in 2027. One source said Nvidia told partners they might receive only 5% to 10% of the quantities requested. Part of the squeeze is Nvidia's own manufacturing priorities: starting in 2027, the company is expected to devote much of its capacity at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co to Rubin, its next-generation platform for large-scale data centres, rather than products like the RTX PRO 5500, two of the sources said. Nvidia has told customers to expect early samples in December, with commercial deliveries beginning in the first quarter of 2027.

What the card actually is

On Nvidia's official product page, the RTX PRO 5500 Blackwell Workstation Edition is a professional GPU built on the Blackwell architecture with 84 GB of GDDR7 memory with error-correcting code, 1,398 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth, a PCIe Gen 5 x16 bus and maximum power consumption of up to 600 watts. Its Multi-Instance GPU feature can partition one card into up to two isolated instances of up to 42 GB each. Nvidia labels the page's specifications preliminary and subject to change, and lists the card as coming soon — a useful reminder that the reported order book is for a product that has not yet shipped commercially.

One disclosed contract shows the terms buyers are accepting

One order is a matter of public record. Tansun Technology, a Shenzhen-listed financial technology and AI-computing services company, disclosed in Shenzhen Stock Exchange announcement No. 2026-070, dated Oct. 13, 2026, that it had agreed to buy 20,000 RTX PRO 5500 cards from an unnamed supplier. The filing's terms are demanding: an advance payment up front, then payment for each batch after inspection and before shipment, with the advance credited against the final batch. If manufacturer-related causes prevent the supplier from providing the cards, the agreement provides for termination and repayment of money already paid, without liability for the seller. Tansun cautioned that supply shortages, industry demand and overseas technology controls could delay deliveries or reduce volumes. The filing establishes only Tansun's own terms — not those of ByteDance, Alibaba or Tencent — but it shows, in a signed contract, the same supply risk Reuters' sources described.

A follow-on to September's approval question — and what to watch

This is a new event, not a repeat of TickerGrove's Sept. 28 report that Beijing's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology was weighing whether to let ByteDance and Alibaba buy the card. That story was about permission; this one is about orders actually placed at scale. What to watch now is conversion: whether the December samples arrive on the timetable Reuters reported, what allocations look like when commercial deliveries begin in the first quarter of 2027, and whether any of the four companies confirms any part of the reported figures. Still unknown: how the more than 3 million cards split among the three buyers, whether Beijing approval is still required for the purchases, what final pricing the buyers actually pay, and how many cards Nvidia ultimately allocates to China against the reported global production ceiling.