Nvidia plans to generate $26B annually from RTX Pro 5500 shipments to China

Nvidia appears to have found a very expensive loophole. The company is planning to ship roughly 500,000 units per quarter of its new RTX PRO 5500 Blackwell workstation GPU into China starting late December 2026, a move that could generate approximately $6.5 billion in quarterly revenue, or about $26 billion annually. The key word in that sentence is “workstation.” By classifying the RTX PRO 5500 as a professional workstation GPU rather than a data center chip, Nvidia may be able to thread the needle on US export restrictions that have choked off its most lucrative China sales for years. The numbers behind Nvidia’s China play China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is reportedly assessing purchase plans from major tech firms before potentially greenlighting the deals. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is said to be considering an order of approximately 1 million units alone. Alibaba is also among the companies whose purchase proposals are under review. The RTX PRO 5500 is not a modest piece of hardware. It packs 84 GB of GDDR7 ECC memory and 21,760 CUDA cores, with a thermal design power of up to 600 watts. Pricing in China lands between 85,000 and 90,000 yuan...