Chinese Tech Firms ByteDance, Alibaba & Tencent Order Over ₹3.3 Lakh Crore Of US-Based Nvidia's Export-Compliant RTX PRO 5500 Chips

Chinese tech giants ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have placed a collective order for over 3 million of Nvidia's new RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, with a combined list price surpassing $35 billion (approximately Rs. 3.3 lakh crore). The Chinese firms are making a hasty purchase of this weaker chip as it adheres to US export regulations.

Despite Nvidia's warning that it may struggle to fulfill these orders, demand continues to outpace the company's planned production. According to Reuters, Nvidia has informed customers and partners that it cannot guarantee meeting these orders, as the demand from Chinese tech companies far exceeds the volumes it intends to produce.

Partners were warned they might receive only 5 percent to 10 percent of what they requested. Another source stated that Nvidia has signaled it can produce no more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 cards globally in 2027. The total orders from Chinese customers have surpassed 6 million. These cards are reportedly priced at around $11,400 each.

Alibaba's AI models, Qwen, have achieved over 3 billion downloads, surpassing Google and Meta in the open-source AI space. The RTX PRO 5500 is a workstation chip designed for professional desktop machines, not large data centre clusters where Nvidia's top AI processors operate. US export rules prohibit sales of Nvidia's Blackwell-based B300 data centre chip to China, while exports of the Hopper-based H200 are assessed case by case and come with licensing conditions.

Chinese companies plan to primarily use these cards for AI inference, which involves running trained models to generate chatbot responses, a process that generally requires less computing power than training. RTX PRO 5500 performs similarly to the RTX 6000D, a reduced chip launched by Nvidia in mid-2025 to comply with US restrictions.