Nvidia's China Order Book Is Six Million Chips Deep. Buyers Expect About 1% of Them.

Nvidia has warned customers in China that it cannot come close to filling their orders for its RTX Pro 5500 accelerators, according to a Bloomberg report that puts the scale of the shortfall in stark terms. Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance are among the buyers that have collectively placed orders for roughly 6 million of the chips. Over the next four months, those companies expect to receive only tens of thousands of units — about 1% of what they asked for.

The bottleneck traces back to conflicts in production planning rather than to any collapse in demand, Bloomberg reported. That distinction matters: the figure is the customers' own expectation for a limited window, not a confirmed shipping tally, and a delayed delivery is not a cancellation. Nothing in the report establishes either a permanent loss of demand or a guarantee that the backlog will eventually be filled.

A $12.93 Billion Deal Draws Washington's Eye

Supply is only one of the questions facing shareholders. Reuters reported on 28 October that the US Department of Justice has been gathering information on the competitive implications of Nvidia's planned acquisition of Hugging Face, a transaction valued at $12.93 billion. Completion is expected in the first half of 2027, which leaves the deal firmly in the pending column.

The antitrust inquiries should not be read as a verdict against the purchase, just as the company's expansion announcements do not prove the acquisition has closed. They are separate tracks running in parallel.

Those expansion plans stretch well beyond Hugging Face. A little over a week before the Reuters report, Nvidia and Oracle said they would scale Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's superclusters to several gigawatts, using Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 systems and Vera processors, which were also declared generally available on OCI. A day earlier, on 27 October, Nvidia and Meta unveiled an expanded partnership covering Meta's Muse model family, with Meta planning to deploy Nvidia infrastructure on a larger scale.

An Unverified Rule for Cloud Partners

One reported constraint remains unconfirmed. The Financial Times said Nvidia had instructed customers to sell at least 51% of their services to non-Chinese companies. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report, so the supposed requirement cannot be treated as established business policy.

Funding questions are mounting alongside the build-out. Reuters reported on Friday that Nvidia is in talks to provide multibillion-dollar credit guarantees for AI cloud provider Nscale, backing third-party debt for a data centre intended for Anthropic. Those discussions do not amount to a committed financing obligation.

The Date That Anchors Everything

Nvidia will hold its earnings call on 17 November 2026 to discuss results for the third quarter of fiscal 2027, a period that ended on 25 October. The company announced the date on 28 October.

Until then, the gap between what customers want and what Nvidia can ship will shape how the story is read. Today's delivery expectations point to a serious near-term constraint — but they neither confirm a wave of cancellations nor represent revenue already booked from the orders in question.