Nvidia is expected to deliver only a small fraction of the RTX Pro 5500 workstation GPUs ordered by Chinese technology companies, according to a Bloomberg report citing unnamed sources. The shipments over the next few months are expected to total some tens of thousands of units, or roughly 1% of the reported orders.
ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent are among the companies seeking the GPUs. The report puts the value of Chinese orders at $70 billion, with each unit priced at $11,000. Earlier reports had put orders at more than three million cards, worth $35 billion.
Demand is reported to have outstripped Nvidia’s planned production. The RTX Pro 5500 combines the same number of CUDA cores as the company’s RTX 5090 gaming GPU with 84GB of GDDR7 memory, making it an option for AI workloads. The report says it can be shipped to China without export restrictions, unlike the RTX 5090 and AI-focused workstation GPUs such as the H200 and B300.
Chinese developers reportedly expect an initial delivery of several thousand GPUs by the end of 2026. The report says Nvidia could deliver 700,000 units by the end of 2027 as production increases, though that estimate may change.
An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment to Bloomberg on shipment numbers. The spokesperson criticized U.S. export controls and also referred to China’s own limits on U.S. imports. Tom’s Hardware said it had approached Nvidia for comment.
Sources: Tom's Hardware.