Chinese Buyers Expect Just 1% of Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 Orders in Next Four Months

Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and other Chinese firms have together ordered about 6 million of the cards, according to the report, an order Bloomberg values at about $70 billion. The buyers expect to get only some tens of thousands of units, roughly 1%, within the next four months. On those figures, 1% of the order would be worth about $700 million.

The report attributes the shortfall to Nvidia's difficulty in increasing production fast enough to keep up with demand. It does not quote Nvidia, and the 1% figure reflects what the buyers expect rather than a statement from the company.

An Order Built Around Export Limits

The RTX Pro 5500 is a workstation graphics card rather than a data centre chip, and it is less powerful than Nvidia's Hopper-based H200 or its Blackwell-based B300. US export controls bar Nvidia from selling the B300 to Chinese buyers, while H200 sales need case-by-case approval, which has pushed Chinese companies towards products they can buy. Reuters reported in October that the firms want the RTX Pro 5500 mainly for inference, the work of running trained models to answer user queries, which needs less computing power than training.

That Reuters report, published on October 20, said ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent had ordered more than 3 million of the cards, with a combined list price above $35 billion, and that total orders from China exceeded 6 million units. Sources told Reuters at the time that Nvidia had warned it could not guarantee to fill the orders, and one said partners might receive only 5% to 10% of the quantities requested. Wednesday's report suggests near-term deliveries will fall well short even of that range.

Supply Rather Than Demand

The report adds to signs that Nvidia's constraint is how much it can produce, not how much customers want to buy. Memory chip prices have roughly doubled as makers put data centre customers ahead of PC and phone buyers, and AI companies across the US, Europe and the Gulf are competing for the same limited output.

It also lands a day after the Financial Times reported that Nvidia had told cloud providers that most of their customers must be outside China, a sign the company is trying to manage both export risk and the allocation of scarce chips.

For Chinese AI developers, a 1% delivery rate means continued reliance on domestic alternatives, though those face their own limits. Huawei has reportedly told some customers to source memory for its AI chips themselves. For investors, the report shows that a large part of Nvidia's apparent China demand may not become revenue soon, whatever the policy picture in Washington.