Chinese tech giants are reportedly scrambling to acquire Nvidia's less powerful but export-compliant chips amid U.S. restrictions on trade.
ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million of Nvidia's new RTX PRO 5500 GPUs, worth a combined $35 billion, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The U.S.-based chipmaker told customers that it could not guarantee fulfilment as demand significantly exceeds planned production, the sources said, warning that partners may only receive 5% to 10% of the quantities they have requested. One source said the 3 million figure represents the entirety of Nvidia's estimated global production of RTX PRO 5500s next year, while total orders from Chinese firms exceed 6 million units.
US export controls
Following U.S. restrictions on chip exports, Nvidia's powerful Blackwell-based B300 data-center chips cannot be sold to Chinese buyers. The RTX PRO 5500 is less powerful, designed for professional computers rather than large data-center clusters. However, they are among the most powerful Nvidia GPUs that remain available to China.
Chinese companies are primarily looking to use the GPUs for AI inference, the sources said, which generally requires less computing power than training models on huge datasets.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has previously said that the U.S. restrictions had cut the firm's near monopoly in China to effectively zero, pushing Chinese firms toward domestic suppliers like Huawei, while Beijing has also encouraged the use of homegrown chips. Nevertheless, the orders suggest substantial demand for the Nvidia products that are still available to the Chinese market.
The fulfilment issues also reflect Nvidia's manufacturing priorities, the sources said, noting that the firm is expected to devote most of its Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. capacity to its next-generation Vera Rubin GPUs from next year.