China's tech giants order $35B in Nvidia chips — and Nvidia can't deliver
What's the deal? ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have collectively ordered more than $35 billion worth of Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 GPUs, one of the most powerful chips still compliant with US export controls, according to Reuters. Nvidia has warned the Chinese firms it cannot guarantee the orders, as demand far exceeds planned production.
Why the shortfall? The three companies ordered more than 3 million chips at roughly $11,400 each, but Nvidia has told customers they might receive only 5% to 10% of what they requested. Total Chinese orders are reported to exceed 6 million cards, against Nvidia's own stated global production cap of no more than 3 million cards in 2027.
Why now? US export controls bar China from buying Nvidia's top AI chips, pushing demand toward less powerful but compliant alternatives like the RTX Pro 5500. Chinese firms have already bought more than 1 million export-compliant Nvidia GPUs in 2026, as domestic chip output still falls short of demand — and the order lands the same week Washington ordered DeepSeek products stripped out of US federal civilian agencies.
What could go wrong? The $35 billion figure is an order total, not secured revenue. Deliveries are not expected to start until 2027, and Nvidia plans to prioritise its next-generation Rubin platform, so the headline number should not be read as an imminent sales windfall.
The signal: The orders matter less as a mega-deal than as evidence that export controls are redirecting demand toward workarounds — and that China's near-term AI buildout remains dependent on Nvidia hardware.
Read more: Reuters via Economic Times, The Verge
