Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) has taken orders for more than 3 million Blackwell chips worth roughly $35 billion from Chinese technology giants ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity. The news barely moved the stock: shares edged higher on the day even as broader markets climbed, extending a decline of more than 9% over the past two weeks. Sentiment has been weighed down by uncertainty over the AI trade, strained balance sheets at debt-laden neoclouds, and Anthropic’s apparent hesitation to proceed with its suspected initial public offering.
Nvidia may not be able to fulfill the full order, having never planned for such production volumes. One source told Reuters the company could meet only 5% to 10% of requested quantities, with global Blackwell output capped at about 3 million units in 2027. A separate report from the Taipei Times framed the purchase as RTX PRO 5500 workstation graphics cards priced at about $11,400 apiece, putting the three companies’ potential combined order above $35 billion. That outlet added that total orders from Chinese customers already exceed 6 million units, with early samples expected in December and commercial shipments set to begin in the first quarter of next year.
Sales to China have long been constrained. In April 2025, after imposing new tariffs, the Trump administration told Nvidia that an export license would be required to keep selling data-center chips to Chinese companies; a similar requirement existed under the Biden administration, with both administrations citing national security. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang met with Trump on multiple occasions and lobbied Washington regulators before striking a deal under which Nvidia would cede 15% of its China chip sales to the government. Because of reservations held on both the Chinese and U.S. regulatory sides, those sales have barely resumed.
Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said on the late-August earnings call that less than 1% of data-center revenue came from Chinese customers, and that the product involved was the older-generation Hopper 200 chip. Kress noted that Hopper sales dilute gross margins, making the ability to sell Blackwell chips to Chinese customers a positive signal. Under current restrictions, the Blackwell-based B300 data-center chip is banned from China, while Hopper-based H200 shipments are considered case by case under licensing conditions. The RTX PRO 5500 targets professional workstations rather than large data-center clusters and remains among the most powerful Nvidia products still available to Chinese buyers.
For investors, the key point is that China sales have not been factored into Nvidia’s forward guidance. On the last quarterly call, management projected fiscal 2027 third-quarter revenue of about $108 billion, against which a potential $35 billion order is far from immaterial; even partial fulfillment would represent incremental revenue outside existing guidance. Selling Blackwell into China also replaces margin-dilutive Hopper sales with a higher-margin product, and large-scale procurement despite the restrictions offers fresh evidence of AI demand intensity that markets can hardly read as negative.
The muted reaction has its own logic. Nvidia’s market value stands at about $5.23 trillion, and the company has already guided to 70% revenue growth in fiscal 2028, leaving expectations highly full. Investors remain unsure whether the AI trade can sustain current chip-purchase levels, and the modest gain on the news suggests the upside has been partly priced in.
On the next earnings call, analysts will press for three details: the actual size of the order, how much Nvidia can deliver, and the share of sales that must be ceded to the government. While the stock lacks near-term momentum, Chinese demand is hard to view as anything but broadly positive for Nvidia and the AI trade as a whole.
