Nvidia Hands China Just 1% of a $70B RTX Chip Order

Chinese tech giants placed one of the biggest graphics card orders in recent memory. They are about to get almost none of it. Bloomberg reports Nvidia's Chinese clients will receive roughly 1% of a $70 billion order for RTX chips, per Crypto Briefing. Nvidia has told partners it cannot guarantee the orders will be filled at all.

The numbers behind the squeeze are wild. ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent together ordered more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 units, valued at around $35 billion, or about $11,400 a card. Add the rest of Nvidia's Chinese customers and total orders reportedly top 6 million units, which at list prices pencils out to roughly $70 billion. Nvidia pegs global production capacity for the card in 2027 at 3 million units, so China's demand alone runs more than double the entire world's supply.

The RTX PRO 5500 is not Nvidia's most powerful silicon. That is exactly the point. It is a workstation card built for professional visual work, but Chinese buyers want it for AI inference, the stage where a trained model answers queries instead of learning. Nvidia's beefier accelerators, like the Blackwell B300, are fenced off by US export controls, leaving Chinese firms to snap up whatever sits on the permitted side of the line.

There is a second filter beyond Washington. Nvidia reportedly prioritizes its next-generation platforms when it hands out commercial capacity, which could leave even less room for the RTX PRO 5500 no matter how many purchase orders stack up. Earlier reporting suggested Chinese clients might land 5% to 10% of what they asked for. Bloomberg's 1% figure points to a much tighter squeeze.

The clock is ticking on concrete milestones. Sample units are expected by December 2026, with production starting in the first quarter of 2027 and commercial shipments targeted for that same quarter. Those dates will reveal whether allocations land near Bloomberg's 1% or closer to the earlier 5% to 10% range.

Either way, the episode exposes how hard Chinese tech still leans on Nvidia. Export rules narrowed their options; they did not kill the appetite. And with orders so far over the 2027 production cap, limited supply could command higher prices, leaving early allocation winners holding hardware worth more than they paid.