ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent order Nvidia cards

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, according to people familiar with the orders, in a potential deal valued at more than US$35 billion. The reported purchases come as US export restrictions limit Chinese access to Nvidia’s most advanced chips, while the company has warned it cannot guarantee delivery of the requested quantities. The figures and order details come from anonymous sources, and the companies named have not confirmed them. The reported value is potential, based on an estimated price of about US$11,400 per card, not a confirmed value for completed purchases or delivered goods. The RTX PRO 5500 is a workstation graphics card, rather than a processor designed for large data-center clusters. It is among Nvidia’s most powerful products still available to Chinese buyers. The sources said Chinese technology companies intend to use the cards mainly for AI inference, the process of running trained models to produce responses, which generally requires less computing power than training models. Nvidia reportedly told customers and partners it could not guarantee supply because demand from Chinese technology...