China's tech giants reportedly order over $35B of Nvidia GPUs to work around US curbs

Chinese technology giants are flooding Nvidia with GPU orders, using the purchase volume of export-compliant parts to offset the compute they cannot buy at the top of the range, Chosunbiz reported on October 21. ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent are named as the main buyers behind the wave.

The orders center on the RTX PRO 5500, a workstation card that fits inside current US export rules. A Reuters exclusive put the combined value of the three companies' orders at more than 35 billion dollars.

The volume is the striking part. Reports cited by Tom's Hardware described roughly three million cards, while TrendForce was more cautious, estimating that only five to ten percent of the orders could actually be filled. The gap between paper demand and delivered hardware is enormous.

The workaround is straightforward in logic and painful in practice: buy the best export-compliant card available, then buy millions of them. Where cutting-edge data center accelerators are walled off, scale becomes the substitute for per-chip performance, and clusters are assembled out of parts that were never designed for the job.

Nvidia's own framing matters here. According to The Next Web, the company described the curbs as outdated, arguing that the current thresholds no longer reflect the real technology and market landscape. That is both a complaint and a bid for more policy room to sell compliant products into China.

For the supply chain, the surge creates two problems at once. Global capacity has to be split across other buyers, so Chinese orders are unlikely to be prioritized, and a compliant purchase of this size inevitably tests how much slack the existing rules actually contain.

What to watch next is delivery pace, whether Chinese cloud providers steer these cards toward inference and industry-specific models rather than frontier training, and whether regulators respond by tightening the list to cover workstation-class parts as well. For domestic chip suppliers, the shortage window is also an opening.