ByteDance is considering purchasing one million NVIDIA RTX PRO 5500 GPUs at once. Based on pricing in the Chinese market, this could amount to an order worth nearly RMB 90 billion. According to the latest report from The Information, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has recently requested Alibaba, ByteDance, and other companies to report their procurement quantities and specific use cases for the RTX PRO 5500, and has already signaled to some firms that approval for purchases may be forthcoming. However, no final decisions have been made yet—how many units will be approved and when remains uncertain. ByteDance stands out as the most extreme case. The RTX PRO 5500 is priced in China at approximately RMB 85,000 to 90,000 per unit. If ByteDance were to fully execute an order of one million units, the theoretical value could reach RMB 85 to 90 billion. NVIDIA itself plans to begin shipping the RTX PRO 5500 by the end of December, with a quarterly target of about 500,000 units for China. This means that ByteDance alone could consume two full quarters of NVIDIA’s planned production capacity. Moreover, the RTX PRO 5500 is not even NVIDIA’s flagship data center AI GPU in the traditional sense. It is a professional workstation GPU based on the Blackwell architecture, featuring 84GB GDDR7 memory without the high-speed interconnects or HBM found in data center cards—but it is more than sufficient for inference workloads. Chinese buyers are already preparing to install eight GPUs per server to run models, and NVIDIA has explicitly listed LLM inference and Agentic AI as official use cases for this product. What’s truly significant here is that China’s AI computing challenge has now shifted from “whether there are domestic alternatives” to “whether domestic supply can keep up with demand.” Huawei itself has acknowledged that domestic demand for AI chips has surpassed supply capacity. With models, agents, and inference services all scaling rapidly, what companies lack is not willingness to purchase—but actual chips. NVIDIA previously stated that Chinese workstation chip manufacturers have experienced “unprecedented growth” since 2022. Jensen Huang also noted that NVIDIA’s market share in China’s high-end AI accelerator segment has dropped from around 95% to nearly zero. But the potential order of one million units makes the demand unmistakably clear. NVIDIA has never lacked Chinese customers—it lacks a permit that would allow those customers to place legal orders.