China’s tech giants expect just 1% of Nvidia chip orders

Chinese AI developers, among them Alibaba ↘ 1.12%, Tencent and ByteDance, have ordered about 6 million of Nvidia's ↗ 2.29% RTX Pro 5500 chips. Over the next four months they expect to get only some tens of thousands, roughly 1% of the total, Bloomberg reported on November 4, citing people familiar with the matter. The shortfall comes as the US chipmaker struggles to raise production fast enough to keep up with demand.bloomberg.com

Bloomberg valued the orders at about $70 billion, with each chip priced above $11,000. Buyers expect several thousand units by the end of 2026 and tens of thousands more around February, according to Finimize's summary of the report. Some Chinese customers estimate that cumulative deliveries could reach about 700,000 units by the end of 2027. That is roughly 12% of what they ordered. Nvidia told Bloomberg that supply would remain limited for the foreseeable future because of production constraints and scheduling conflicts.finimize.com

A Squeeze Tighter Than First Signaled

The new timeline is worse than what Nvidia's customers heard in October. On October 20, Reuters reported that ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent alone had ordered more than 3 million RTX Pro 5500 cards at about $11,400 each, worth more than $35 billion combined, and that total orders from China had passed 6 million. One source told Reuters that Nvidia warned partners they might receive only 5% to 10% of what they requested. Another said the company could make no more than 3 million of the cards worldwide in 2027.reuters.com

Reuters' sources said the cap reflects Nvidia's manufacturing priorities. The company plans to devote much of its capacity at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing ↗ 1.55% to Rubin, its next-generation data-center platform, starting in 2027, according to Reuters' Japanese-language report. Nvidia had told customers to expect early samples in December, with commercial deliveries starting in the first quarter of 2027.reuters.com

Why China Wants a Workstation Chip

The RTX Pro 5500 is built for powerful professional workstations, not large data-center clusters. Even so, it is among the most powerful Nvidia chips Chinese buyers can still get under US export controls, Reuters noted. Chinese companies plan to use the cards mainly for AI inference, which means running trained models to answer chatbot queries. Inference needs less computing power than training. Washington bars sales of Nvidia's Blackwell B300 to China, and the older H200 needs a case-by-case license, according to Reuters.reuters.com

Beijing has also signaled it is open to the purchases. In September, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology asked companies including ByteDance and Alibaba to report their plans to buy the RTX Pro 5500, and told some of them it intended to approve the deals, Reuters reported, citing The Information. The Chinese firms that ordered the chips now face a long wait. In the words of Finimize, access is "being decided by allocation and scheduling, not just price."reuters.com+1