“China’s Big Three—ByteDance, Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings Limited—Order 48 Trillion Won Worth of NVIDIA Chips”

[Financial News] Three major Chinese technology companies—ByteDance, Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings Limited—have reportedly ordered at least 3 million NVIDIA RTX PRO 5500 GPUs, which are not subject to U.S. export controls. Priced at $11,400 (about 15 million won) each, the total comes to $35 billion (about 48 trillion won).
According to foreign media reports on the 20th (local time), ByteDance, Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings Limited, three major Chinese tech companies, are expected to use the NVIDIA chips for AI inference, which generates chatbot responses and other outputs from already-trained models. Inference requires relatively less computing power than model training.
The RTX PRO 5500 offers performance similar to the RTX 6000D, which NVIDIA produced last year for export to China.
However, sources say NVIDIA communicated that it could deliver only about 5–10% of the requested volume. That is because NVIDIA can produce at most around 3 million units in 2027, while orders from China have already exceeded 6 million.
This shows strong Chinese demand for NVIDIA products despite U.S. export controls on NVIDIA’s advanced products to China. 
The companies appear to have put off purchases because of the high price relative to performance, waiting for the United States to ease its sanctions, before ultimately choosing the RTX PRO 5500.
The RTX PRO 5500 is not a high-performance AI processor for large-scale data centers, but a graphics processing unit (GPU) for professional workstations. It is currently the most powerful NVIDIA product that China can legally buy without running afoul of U.S. export controls.
China is completely barred from buying NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell-based B300 for data centers. Exports of the Hopper-based H200 to China are also allowed only with a license granted after a case-by-case review.
Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO, previously said that U.S. sanctions had caused NVIDIA’s share of China’s AI data-center semiconductor market—in which it once held a monopoly—to fall virtually to zero.
NVIDIA plans to shift much of TSMC’s production capacity from products such as the RTX PRO 5500 to Rubin, its next-generation data-center platform, starting in 2027, which is expected to make RTX PRO 5500 supplies even harder to secure. 

[email protected] Lee Seok-woo, International Affairs Specialist Reporter