Nvidia's Chinese RTX Pro 5500 Orders: Only 1% May Ship Soon

Delivery expectations for the huge GPU orders that Chinese tech giants have placed with Nvidia are falling far short of demand. According to a report based on unnamed sources, companies such as ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent will receive only a small portion of the RTX Pro 5500 workstation graphics cards they ordered in the coming months.

The report says the volume to be delivered over the next few months amounts to a few tens of thousands of units, roughly 1% of the total orders. The figure shows how far demand outstrips what Nvidia has planned to produce, and why the product has become so sought-after by Chinese firms.

Order volume has reportedly doubled

Earlier reports claimed that Chinese companies had placed orders worth around $35 billion for more than 3 million RTX Pro 5500 cards. The new report puts that figure at $70 billion, with a unit price of roughly $11,000.

The numbers suggest demand is far beyond the production capacity Nvidia has planned. The number of GPUs the company can build is limited compared with what the Chinese firms have ordered. Because all of the figures rest on anonymous sources, they should be read as reported estimates rather than confirmed data.

Why the RTX Pro 5500 is in such demand

Two main factors explain the interest. The first is the hardware: the RTX Pro 5500 has the same number of CUDA cores as the flagship gaming card, the RTX 5090, but comes with 84 GB of GDDR7 memory. That extra memory makes the card a good option for AI workloads.

The second is its shipping status. Unlike the RTX 5090, or AI-focused workstation and data center GPUs such as the H200 and B300, the RTX Pro 5500 is not subject to an export restriction for China, so it can be shipped there without limits. With China racing the US to build better AI models, GPUs like the RTX Pro 5500 are central to that effort.

Nvidia has also reportedly stopped producing the RTX 5090 as it shifts toward its enterprise and AI-heavy customer base, which hints at the direction of the company's production priorities.

Delivery timeline and Nvidia's response

According to the report, Chinese developers expect a first batch of a few thousand RTX Pro 5500 units by the end of 2026. As Nvidia ramps up production, a total of 700,000 units is expected to be delivered by the end of 2027, though the report notes that this number could change. Even if that forecast holds, only a fraction of the more than 3 million units ordered would be covered.

An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment on shipment volumes. Instead, the spokesperson criticized what they called "outdated" US export controls, which also cover gaming products released about half a decade ago. The statement stressed that the company's operations continue to be affected both by those controls and by China's own restrictions on US products.