Nvidia cannot guarantee delivery of 3 million+ RTX PRO 5500 orders from China

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have reportedly ordered more than 3 million units of Nvidia's RTX PRO 5500 workstation graphics card, orders worth over $35 billion at list price, and Nvidia has told customers and partners it cannot guarantee it will fill them, according to Bloomberg.

One source told the outlet that partners were warned they could receive only 5-10% of the volume they requested. A second source said Nvidia's worldwide RTX PRO 5500 output for 2027 is 3 million units or fewer, while total orders in China already exceed 6 million units.

Nvidia has reportedly told customers that samples will be provided in early December and that commercial shipments will begin in the first quarter of 2027. Chinese companies mainly plan to use the cards for AI inference.

Disclosure from a listed customer

Tansun Technology disclosed on October 13 that it agreed to buy 20,000 RTX PRO 5500 cards from an unidentified counterparty, and warned that deliveries could be delayed or reduced.

The orders come as Nvidia's Blackwell-based B300 datacenter chips are banned from sale to China under US export controls, while the Hopper-based H200 requires case-by-case review and permits. In 2022 and after, makers of workstation chips and cards in China have seen unprecedented growth, according to an Nvidia spokesperson.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said US restrictions have reduced Nvidia's share of China's AI datacenter chip market to effectively zero. The earlier China-market RTX 6000D, launched last year with reduced performance to meet US rules, drew little interest from Chinese big tech over poor price-performance and is now discontinued. Nvidia is also expected to allocate much of TSMC's capacity from 2027 to its next-generation datacenter platform Rubin.