Chinese Firms Order 6M Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 Cards Amid Supply Crunch
Major Chinese tech firms including Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance have ordered approximately 6 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 GPUs worth $70 billion, yet Nvidia can supply only about 1% within the next four months. Demand is driven by the card's compliance with US export limits and its 84GB GDDR7 memory, which enables single-card inference for 70B-parameter models. However, global production is capped at an estimated 3 million units in 2027 as TSMC capacity shifts to Rubin chips, creating a severe supply-demand gap.
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Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) · 2026-11-04 12
Chinese AI and cloud firms have ordered about 6M RTX Pro 5500 cards worth roughly $70B, yet Nvidia can only supply about 1%, within the next 4 months.
Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance alone ordered more than 3M, part of a $70B backlog priced above $11,000 per card.
Demand is this high because the Blackwell card matches the RTX 5090’s 21,760 CUDA cores, carries 84GB of GDDR7 memory and clears US export limits.
That memory fits a 70B-parameter model in 8-bit form on one card, which suits inference, the query-answering work buyers mainly want it for.
Nvidia reportedly told partners it can build at most 3M cards worldwide in 2027, as TSMC capacity shifts to its Rubin data center chips.
Even buyers’ own estimate of about 700K deliveries by the end of 2027 covers roughly 12% of what they ordered.
