China's three biggest tech companies have placed more than $35 billion in orders for one Nvidia chip. ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million of Nvidia's new RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, priced at about $11,400 each, Reuters reported on Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, citing two people familiar with the matter. The orders had not been reported before.

The RTX PRO 5500 is a workstation card rather than a data-center AI chip, but it is among the most powerful Nvidia parts Chinese buyers can still get under U.S. export controls. Nvidia's Blackwell-based B300 cannot be sold to Chinese buyers, and exports of the Hopper-based H200 are reviewed case by case, Reuters said. The three companies want the cards mainly for AI inference, meaning running already-trained models to answer chatbot requests.

Nvidia may fill only a fraction

Nvidia has told customers and partners it cannot guarantee it can fill the orders because Chinese demand far exceeds planned production, according to the two sources and a third person. One source said buyers might get only 5% to 10% of what they asked for. Another said Nvidia indicated it could make no more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 cards worldwide in 2027. Total orders from customers in China have topped 6 million, two of the sources said.

Part of the squeeze is Nvidia's own priorities: starting in 2027 it is expected to put much of its TSMC capacity toward Rubin, its next-generation data-center platform, two sources said. Customers have been told to expect early samples in December and commercial deliveries from the first quarter of 2027. TSMC declined to comment.

Why it matters

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said U.S. curbs cut Nvidia's share of China's AI data-center chip market from near-monopoly to effectively nothing. The size of these orders suggests a sizeable market remains for less powerful chips. An Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters that Chinese makers of workstation chips and cards have seen "unprecedented growth since 2022," when the curbs began. Separately, Shenzhen-listed Tansun Technology disclosed on Oct. 13 that it agreed to buy 20,000 RTX PRO 5500 cards from an unnamed seller, warning that shortages and export controls could delay or shrink deliveries.

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