Chinese Buyers Expect Just 1% of $70 Billion in Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 Orders

Economic Warfare & Trade Policy › Tech & export controls

Chinese tech giants have lined up about $70 billion worth of Nvidia China RTX Pro 5500 orders, but they expect to receive only about 1% of those chips over the next four months, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026, citing people familiar with the matter. Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and other Chinese AI and cloud companies have ordered roughly 6 million of the workstation graphics cards, according to the report.

Key figures: About 6 million RTX Pro 5500 chips ordered · About $70 billion in orders · Roughly 1% expected in the next four months · About 700,000 expected by end-2027

What Chinese buyers ordered and what they expect to get

According to Bloomberg, as summarized by Tom’s Hardware and Investing.com, the Chinese buyers now expect deliveries of only “some tens of thousands” of RTX Pro 5500 cards during the coming four months. They expect a first batch of several thousand units by the end of 2026, followed by tens of thousands around February. Their internal estimates point to about 700,000 units delivered by the end of 2027, though that depends on how quickly Nvidia can raise output.

The figures are buyers’ expectations, not a shipment schedule confirmed by Nvidia. The report valued the orders at more than $11,000 per chip. Nvidia has not publicly broken out RTX Pro 5500 sales to China.

Why the RTX Pro 5500 matters for China’s AI push

The RTX Pro 5500 has become a favorite of Chinese AI developers because it can legally be sold there. Tom’s Hardware reported that the card uses the same number of CUDA cores as Nvidia’s flagship RTX 5090 gaming chip but carries 84 GB of GDDR7 memory, which makes it useful for running AI models. Unlike Nvidia’s data-center accelerators such as the H200 and B300, it is not covered by the U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips.

Supply is the problem. Bloomberg reported that Nvidia and its manufacturing partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. are giving priority to newer products such as the Rubin platform, which leaves fewer RTX Pro 5500 cards to go around. Nvidia has said U.S. export rules and China’s own limits on U.S. chip imports continue to restrict its business there.

By the numbers: orders doubled in two weeks

The size of China’s order book has grown quickly. On Oct. 20, Reuters reported that ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent had ordered more than 3 million RTX Pro 5500 cards worth more than $35 billion, and that Nvidia’s planned global production of the card for 2027 was about 3 million units. The new Bloomberg figures put orders at about 6 million chips and $70 billion.

• Orders: up about 3 million chips, or roughly 100%, between the Oct. 20 and Nov. 4 reports (TBR calculation from Reuters and Bloomberg figures).
• Order value: up about $35 billion, also roughly double.
• Coverage by end-2027: the 700,000 chips buyers expect would fill about 11.7% of 6 million ordered (TBR calculation).
• Versus total supply: 6 million chips is about twice the roughly 3 million cards Reuters said Nvidia planned to make for all customers worldwide in 2027 (TBR calculation).

On these figures, most of the orders cannot be filled on any near-term schedule. When the 3 million-chip orders were first reported in October, Tom’s Hardware noted warnings that only about 10% of them could be filled; the new Bloomberg estimate of about 1% in the next four months is far below even that. The Bloomberg report did not say whether any orders would be canceled.

A wider squeeze on Chinese access to AI chips

The shortfall lands in a week of other pressure on Chinese companies’ access to U.S. AI hardware. On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that Nvidia had told its cloud and data-center partners to limit Chinese customers to 49% of their business on new contracts. Nvidia neither confirmed nor denied the report, according to The Next Web, but said in a statement that “America cannot win the AI race unless America’s AI infrastructure wins worldwide.”

On Wednesday, the FT also reported that Oracle had canceled a roughly $7 billion chip-leasing deal with Tencent after pressure from U.S. officials. Earlier this week, The Boston Report covered how U.S. licensing delays are hitting SK hynix’s chip plant in Dalian, China, and Tencent’s launch of its new Hy4 AI model, which needs large amounts of computing power to train and run.

What to watch

Nvidia’s next quarterly report will be the first chance for the company to address the China order backlog publicly. Investors will also watch whether TSMC adds capacity for the card, and whether Washington moves to tighten rules on chips that are currently exempt from export limits. Rival AMD reported this week that its data-center revenue nearly doubled, a sign that demand for AI computing still outruns supply across the industry.

Sources

• Bloomberg: Nvidia China Clients to Get 1% of $70 Billion RTX Chips Ordered (Nov. 4, 2026)
• Tom’s Hardware: Nvidia can only fulfill 1% of China’s $70 billion GPU order, report claims
• Investing.com: Nvidia China clients to get 1% of $70 bln RTX chips ordered
• CNBC TV18 (citing Reuters): ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent place over $35 billion worth of Nvidia chip orders
• Tom’s Hardware: China’s tech giants drop $35 billion on RTX Pro 5500 orders (October 2026)
• The Next Web: Nvidia tells cloud partners to cap Chinese business at 49%, FT reports