[News] NVIDIA RTX PRO 5500 Reportedly Draws $35B in China Orders, with Supply Seen at Just 5–10%
Despite CEO Jensen Huang’s warning that NVIDIA’s share of China’s AI accelerator market has plunged from over 90% to nearly zero amid U.S. export curbs, demand for its lower-performance GPUs is surging. According to Reuters, ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 GPUs worth over $35 billion combined, even as NVIDIA warns partners they may receive just 5%–10% of requested volumes.
NVIDIA has meanwhile advised customers that initial samples are expected in December, followed by commercial shipments in 1Q27, according to Reuters.
The RTX PRO 5500, unlike NVIDIA’s cutting-edge AI accelerators, is primarily designed for professional workstations, and remains one of the most powerful NVIDIA GPUs accessible in China. Currently, Blackwell-based B300 data-center GPUs remain off-limits to Chinese customers, while shipments of the Hopper-based H200 require case-by-case approval and are subject to licensing restrictions, the report notes.
Despite its lower performance compared with NVIDIA’s H200 and B300, the RTX PRO 5500 has emerged as an attractive option for Chinese tech firms seeking AI inference capacity, Reuters notes. Unlike compute-intensive AI training, inference workloads such as generating chatbot responses generally require less processing power, making the workstation GPU a viable alternative.
RTX PRO 5500 Faces Supply Squeeze as Rubin Takes Priority
The scale of demand, however, threatens to overwhelm NVIDIA’s supply. According to Reuters, Chinese orders alone have reportedly topped 6 million units, more than double the chipmaker’s potential global production of 3 million RTX PRO 5500 GPUs in 2027. With capacity stretched thin, partners may receive just 5%–10% of their requested volumes, sources said.
Adding to the crunch, NVIDIA is reportedly prioritizing its next-generation Rubin platform for large-scale AI data centers. Starting in 2027, Rubin is expected to absorb a substantial share of the company’s manufacturing capacity at TSMC, leaving less room for the RTX PRO 5500, Reuters notes.
RTX PRO 5500: Key Specs in Focus
Notably, NVIDIA has already quietly listed the RTX PRO 5500 on its official website, positioning it for agentic and physical AI workloads. Built on TSMC’s custom 4N process, according to NVIDIA board partner PNY, the Blackwell-based GPU packs 84GB of memory, as detailed by NVIDIA.
Despite its mid-tier branding, the RTX PRO 5500 comes surprisingly close to the flagship RTX PRO 6000, VideoCardz reports. With 21,760 CUDA cores and 84GB of GDDR7, it reportedly trails the top-end model by just 9.6% in core count and 12.5% in memory capacity. The gap widens in bandwidth, however, with 1,398 GB/s versus the RTX PRO 6000’s 1,792 GB/s.
By comparison, the RTX PRO 5000 offers 48GB or 72GB of GDDR7 with a much lower 300W power ceiling, VideoCardz suggests, adding that the new 5500 thus bridges the substantial gap between NVIDIA’s RTX PRO 5000 and 6000, bringing near-flagship specifications and the full 600W power budget to a lower-tier workstation GPU.
The RTX PRO 5500’s growing appeal also contrasts with the lukewarm reception of NVIDIA’s earlier China-focused RTX 6000D. Introduced in mid-2025 to comply with U.S. export controls, the inference-oriented GPU struggled to attract major Chinese buyers, who reportedly viewed its performance as insufficient to justify the price, according to Reuters.
As previously reported by The Information, RTX PRO 5500 is priced at around RMB 85,000–90,000 in China, comparable to Huawei’s Ascend 950PR.
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(Photo credit: NVIDIA)
