Three major Chinese tech companies, including ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent, have ordered more than 3 million units of NVIDIA's RTX PRO 5500, which are exempt from U.S. export controls, Reuters reported, citing three sources speaking on condition of anonymity.

Priced at $11,400 (approximately 15 million won) per unit, the total amount reaches $350 billion (approximately 48 trillion won).

The RTX PRO 5500 is not a high-performance artificial intelligence (AI) processor for large-scale data centers, but rather a professional workstation graphics processing unit (GPU).

It is currently the most powerful NVIDIA product that China can legally purchase while bypassing U.S. export restrictions.

NVIDIA's latest Blackwell-based B300 for data centers is completely banned from being sold to China, and exports of the Hopper-based H200 to China are also only possible if a license is granted through case-by-case reviews.

According to one source, NVIDIA has communicated that it can only deliver about 5% to 10% of the requested volume.

Another source stated that the volume NVIDIA can produce throughout 2027 is around a maximum of 3 million units, while current orders from China have exceeded 6 million units.

Reuters interpreted this as demonstrating China's strong demand for NVIDIA products despite U.S. export controls targeting advanced NVIDIA items.

Previously, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated that NVIDIA's market share in China's AI data center semiconductor market, which it once monopolized, had effectively dropped to zero due to U.S. sanctions.

Chinese companies are reportedly planning to use the NVIDIA chips for AI inference, which generates chatbot responses and other outputs through already-trained models.

Inference requires relatively less computational power compared to model training.

The RTX PRO 5500 has performance similar to the RTX 6000D, which NVIDIA produced last year specifically for customized exports to China.

It appears that Chinese firms delayed their purchases, citing the high price relative to performance, and waited for the U.S. sanctions to ease before ultimately choosing the RTX PRO 5500.

However, Reuters expected that supplies of the RTX PRO 5500 will become even tighter as NVIDIA plans to shift a large portion of TSMC's production capacity away from products like the RTX PRO 5500 and toward its next-generation data center platform, Rubin, starting in 2027.

(Photo: AP, Yonhap News)