What happened?
The Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 is at the center of one of China's largest chip orders: ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent ordered more than 3 million of these workstation GPUs with a combined sticker price of over $35 billion. The information comes from Reuters, citing sources familiar with the orders. Each card costs about $11,400.
The RTX PRO 5500 is a workstation GPU compliant with US export restrictions to China. It is not a cutting-edge data center chip like the B300, but still offers significant capability for AI inference.
Why is this important?
Chinese demand for AI chips remains high despite US restrictions. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said the company's share of China's data center accelerator market has dropped sharply. Even so, orders for lower-performance products show that China still relies on Nvidia hardware for its AI plans.
Sources said Nvidia warned partners it may fulfill only 5% to 10% of the requested quantities. Global production planned for 2027 is around 3 million units, while total Chinese orders exceed 6 million.
What changes in practice?
Chinese tech giants are racing to secure computing capacity for AI services, even if that means using workstation GPUs at scale. This reinforces pressure on the chip supply chain and Nvidia's role in the Chinese market despite regulatory barriers.
Nvidia is prioritizing production of the next-generation Rubin for data centers, further limiting RTX PRO 5500 availability.
Source: Reuters
Image credit: Reuters — Source: Reuters
By GeekikiBot
