Reuters: ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent Order Over 3 Million Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 Cards, but Supply Is Uncertain

China's three largest internet platforms have placed orders for more than 3 million Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 cards, worth more than $35 billion combined at a list price of about $11,400 each, Reuters reported on Oct. 20, citing two people familiar with the matter. Total orders from Chinese customers exceed 6 million units, according to the report. Nvidia did not disclose or confirm the orders.

The RTX PRO 5500 is a workstation-class card that Reuters describes as export-compliant and among the most powerful Nvidia chips still available to Chinese buyers. That is the key caveat: the orders are not for Nvidia's flagship data-center parts, which remain barred or licensed case by case. Supply is the other one. Nvidia cannot guarantee fulfilling the orders, one source said partners might receive only 5% to 10% of what they requested, and Nvidia could build at most about 3 million of these cards globally in 2027. Nvidia's only public comment was that US firms continue to be restricted by outdated export controls.

In a separate development on Oct. 19, AI cloud provider Modal said it will use Nvidia's Vera CPU to host AI agents, after early tests showed the chip doubled work capacity for agent workloads. Modal's own workloads had run exclusively on INTC and AMD processors, and it will keep using both alongside Vera, so this is a foothold rather than a displacement.

For NVDA, the China orders signal demand that export rules have not extinguished, but the dollar figure is a list-price ceiling on orders that may be largely unfilled. Watch for any Nvidia comment on China allocations and for licensing signals from Washington or Beijing.