Three of China's biggest tech companies just committed $35 billion to Nvidia chips — and stand to receive barely a tenth of what they ordered.
According to Reuters, ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent together ordered more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 cards, priced at roughly $11,400 apiece. That's not Nvidia's top datacenter silicon — it's a stripped-down workstation chip engineered specifically to clear US export rules.
The reason comes down to what Chinese buyers simply cannot get. The Blackwell-based B300 is banned outright for sale to China, and the Hopper-based H200 needs a license approved case by case. The RTX PRO 5500 is essentially the strongest card Chinese firms can buy without a fight, and it's built mainly for inference — running models that are already trained, rather than training new ones from scratch.
Total orders from Chinese buyers have already topped 6 million cards, double what Nvidia plans to produce worldwide in 2027 — roughly 3 million units for every customer on the planet, not just China. People briefed on the matter told Reuters that partners have been warned to expect only 5% to 10% of what they asked for.
It's a telling reversal. Just weeks ago, Huawei looked like it was closing the gap with Nvidia in China's AI chip market. Yet demand for Nvidia's deliberately weakened, export-legal chip is so intense that buyers are paying premium prices for hardware with a fraction of the power sold elsewhere. For Chinese tech giants, the question isn't which chip is best anymore — it's which chip they're even allowed to have.
Shipments aren't expected before early 2027, and even then, most of this $35 billion in orders will likely go unfilled.
