ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent order $35B+ of NVIDIA's export-compliant RTX PRO 5500 cards

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have placed orders for more than 3 million NVIDIA RTX PRO 5500 cards, collectively worth over $35 billion, Reuters reports. The RTX PRO 5500 is designed to fall within US export-control limits, making it one of the few NVIDIA AI-capable products these firms can legally buy at scale.

The size of the orders shows how much Chinese hyperscalers still rely on NVIDIA despite years of restrictions and domestic chip pushes. Huawei's Ascend line and Alibaba's own silicon efforts haven't removed the demand. These cards will feed both inference for consumer AI apps and fine-tuning workloads, including the Qwen family that underpins much of the region's enterprise AI.

NVIDIA's statement that it cannot guarantee fulfilment is the key caveat. Supply is constrained, and policy risk is real: export rules have tightened repeatedly, and a shipment approved today could be blocked tomorrow. The orders also land the same week Washington ordered federal agencies to purge DeepSeek, a sign that the political climate for US-China AI trade is hardening rather than easing.

For NVIDIA, the deal is a large revenue cushion as Google and AWS push PyTorch backends for their own accelerators to chip away at the CUDA moat. Watch for any Commerce Department response, delivery timelines, and whether Chinese buyers hedge with larger domestic orders if fulfilment slips.