Reuters reported on October 20, 2026, that ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent had jointly ordered more than 3 million NVIDIA RTX PRO 5500 workstation GPUs. The potential combined list-price value exceeds $35 billion, while Chinese customer orders reportedly top 6 million cards and NVIDIA’s worldwide production in 2027 may not exceed 3 million.

NeoTeo previously covered reports that Beijing was weighing whether to let ByteDance buy the RTX PRO 5500. That earlier article addressed the separate question of China’s import permissions.

The reported orders and supply outlook

Reuters attributed the joint order and supply figures to people familiar with the matter. Two sources put the reported order price at about $11,400 per card. A separate source said NVIDIA had indicated it might produce no more than 3 million cards worldwide in 2027.

One Reuters source said partners might receive 5% to 10% of the quantities they requested. That estimate describes possible partner allocations; it is not a stated share for each named company.

A workstation GPU aimed at inference

NVIDIA classifies the RTX PRO 5500 Blackwell Workstation Edition as a workstation GPU. Reuters described it as a workstation product rather than a GPU designed for the largest data-center clusters. The report said Chinese buyers mainly sought the cards for AI inference, which means running models that have already been trained.

NVIDIA lists preliminary specifications that are subject to change: 84 GB of ECC GDDR7 memory, 1,398 GB/s of memory bandwidth, a PCIe Gen 5 x16 interface and power consumption of up to 600 W. The card can also support up to two isolated Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) instances, with up to 42 GB per instance. NVIDIA lists inference, generative AI, graphics and simulation among its intended workloads.

Reported price and shipment plans

The roughly $11,400 figure is a reported order price. On October 21, 2026, NVIDIA’s RTX PRO 5500 product page displayed “Coming Soon,” offered a notification signup and showed no public price.

Reuters reported that NVIDIA planned to begin commercial shipments in the first quarter of 2027.