Chinese Clients May Get Only About 1% of $70 Billion in Nvidia RTX Chip Orders, Bloomberg Reports

Chinese AI and cloud companies including Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance have ordered about 6 million NVDA RTX Pro 5500 chips, worth about $70 billion, but expect to receive only roughly 1% of them within the next four months, according to a Bloomberg report relayed by Investing.com on Wednesday. Bloomberg relied on people familiar with the matter, and the write-up contains no statement from Nvidia.

Supply is tight: Nvidia is struggling to expand production capacity to meet demand. An Oct. 20 Reuters exclusive put orders from ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent at more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 cards, with a sticker price over $35 billion, and said total Chinese orders exceeded 6 million. A source in that report said partners might receive only 5% to 10% of requested quantities, and that Nvidia has said it cannot guarantee it can fill orders.

The new figures are not fully consistent. The Investing.com write-up describes about 10,000 chips arriving, which would be a small fraction of 1% of 6 million, while Seoul Economic Daily's summary of the Bloomberg report put the figure near 60,000. The real fill rate is unclear.

Separately, the Financial Times reported on Nov. 3, citing five people with knowledge of the matter, that Nvidia told its cloud and data center partners to sell at least 51% of their cloud computing services to non-Chinese companies, which caps Chinese customers at 49%. The instruction was reportedly delivered verbally, and it is Nvidia guidance to partners, not a regulatory cap. Chinese firms lease compute through overseas clouds, which Washington is trying to limit. Nvidia is not quoted confirming either report, so watch for a comment on delivery volumes.