Chinese AI Firms May Receive 1% of 6 Million Nvidia GPUs in Four Months

Chinese AI buyers expect to receive only tens of thousands of Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 workstation GPUs over the next four months, about 1% of roughly 6 million units ordered for an estimated $70 billion.

Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance are among the Chinese technology companies behind the orders. The RTX PRO 5500 is a workstation GPU with 84GB of memory and lower performance than Nvidia’s H200 and B300 data-center processors.

Some customers estimate only several thousand cards will arrive by the end of 2026, followed by tens of thousands in February. Nvidia’s earlier estimate put deliveries at 5% to 10% of demand.

U.S. export controls have pushed Chinese buyers toward the workstation card as an alternative to more capable data-center GPUs. Nvidia is prioritizing Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. capacity for Rubin, its higher-margin next-generation chip, while global RTX PRO 5500 output next year may fall short of 3 million units.