ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent Said to Have Ordered More Than 3 Million Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 Cards Worth Over $35 Billion at List Prices, With Nvidia Able to Fill Only 5% to 10%
ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million of Nvidia Corporation's new RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, a batch with a list price above $35 billion at roughly $11,400 a card, Reuters reported on Tuesday, October 20, citing two people familiar with the matter. The card is a workstation product and less powerful than Nvidia's data-center chips, but it is export-compliant and ranks among the strongest Nvidia products Chinese customers can still buy; the companies want it mainly for super intelligence inference, meaning running models that have already been trained.
U.S. rules bar sales of Nvidia's Blackwell-based B300 data-center chip to Chinese buyers, and the older Hopper-based H200 can be exported only after case-by-case review and under licensing conditions, Reuters said. The RTX PRO 5500's predecessor, the RTX 6000D, has been discontinued, and one source said its market price in China has doubled. Shenzhen-listed Tansun Technology disclosed in an October 13 filing that it had agreed to buy 20,000 RTX PRO 5500 cards from an unnamed seller.
On supply, one source told Reuters that Nvidia may be able to fill only 5% to 10% of the requested quantities, having never planned production at such volumes; other reporting put total orders from Chinese customers above 6 million cards, with early samples expected in December and commercial shipments set to begin in the first quarter of next year. Nvidia shares edged higher on Tuesday as broader markets climbed.
Nvidia has sold hardly any chips to China since early last year because of U.S. government restrictions. Chief Executive Jensen Huang has lobbied Washington over the rules, and Nvidia previously struck a deal under which it would cede 15% of its China chip sales to the U.S. government; because of reservations on both the Chinese and U.S. regulatory sides, those sales have barely resumed.
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 英伟达位于加州圣克拉拉的总部大楼资料图。照片：Coolcaesar 摄，CC BY-SA 4.0，经维基共享资源。 / File photo: NVIDIA headquarters in Santa Clara, California. Photo by Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
