Nvidia to fill about 1% of China's RTX Pro 5500 orders

Felix Laurent 4 Nov 2026 4 min read

Big tech

Chinese AI developers expect to receive only a small fraction of the advanced Nvidia chips they ordered. Bloomberg reported this on Nov 4, 2026, citing people familiar with the matter. The report says Nvidia is struggling to boost production to meet soaring demand.

What Bloomberg reported

Bloomberg says Chinese AI and cloud firms, including Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance, ordered about 6 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 chips in total. The companies predict they will get only some tens of thousands within the next four months, about 60,000 according to Seoul Economic Daily. That is roughly 1% of the order.

The headline puts the order value at $70 billion. A retelling by Seoul Economic Daily says the chips cost more than $11,000 apiece. It adds that the buyers had expected about 700,000 chips by the end of 2027. The chip itself explains why they want so many.

What the RTX Pro 5500 is

The RTX Pro 5500 is a Blackwell workstation card, not a data-center chip. Nvidia listed it in its US and European catalogs in September as coming soon, without a press release. According to its listing, as reported by Tech Insider, it has 84GB of GDDR7 memory, 21,760 CUDA cores, the same count as the RTX 5090, and draws up to 600W. Nvidia has published no price.

Seoul Economic Daily says the card is not powerful enough to fall under US export restrictions, which makes it one of the few Nvidia chips Chinese firms can buy. It is not a China-only model, but its memory makes it useful for running AI models. This is not the first report of the orders.

The earlier Reuters report

On Oct 20, Reuters reported a smaller order: more than 3 million cards from ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent, worth more than $35 billion at about $11,400 each. Nvidia warned partners then that it could fill only 5% to 10% of requests, Reuters said. Samples were expected in December and commercial deliveries in the first quarter of 2027. Reuters' sources said Nvidia could build no more than about 3 million of the cards worldwide in 2027.

The two reports differ on the order, 3 million or 6 million units, and on the share, 5% to 10% or about 1%. Tech Insider notes that some outlets mix up the two. What they agree on is that supply, not demand, sets the limit.

Chinese firms ordered about 6 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 chips but expect about 60,000 within four months, while Nvidia China AI chip share fell from 55% to 34%

Why the supply is short

Seoul Economic Daily reports that Nvidia told customers supply is limited for now because of conflicts in its production schedule. It says Nvidia is prioritizing its next Rubin chips and higher-margin products for customers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. This is a retelling and not an Nvidia statement.

Memory is tight too. GDDR7, the memory the card uses, is in short supply, and high-bandwidth memory is reported sold out for 2026, Tech Insider writes. The same squeeze hits Chinese rivals: Huawei raised prices of its top accelerators by 60% in September, Seoul Economic Daily reports. China matters less to Nvidia than it did.

Nvidia in China

Nvidia's share of China's data-center AI chip market fell to 34% in the first half of 2026, from 55% for 2025, according to IDC data reported by Reuters. Huawei had 28%. Beijing has slowed import clearances for Nvidia chips and pushes cloud firms to buy at least 30% of their accelerators from domestic suppliers, the Financial Times has reported.

Washington, meanwhile, has allowed sales of Nvidia's H200 to China under licenses. Jensen Huang said in March that Nvidia had been licensed for many customers in China. A card like the RTX Pro 5500 that needs no license is a simpler path, if Nvidia can make enough of them.

What is not confirmed

Nvidia has not confirmed any of these figures, according to the analysis site Tech Insider. The buyers have not confirmed them either. Seoul Economic Daily attributes a line about outdated US export controls to Nvidia, but Tech Insider found no public Nvidia statement. The report is based on anonymous sources and on what buyers expect over the next four months, not on final deliveries.

So is Nvidia shipping only 1% of China's orders? For the next four months, that is what buyers told Bloomberg. The order may be inflated, since companies that expect rationing tend to over-order, and Reuters put it at half the size two weeks earlier. But both reports agree that Nvidia can make only a small part of what China wants, while it serves OpenAI, Anthropic and its next chips first. For Chinese AI firms, the limit is now Nvidia's factories, not Washington's rules.