Nvidia Can't Fill $35B China GPU Order From ByteDance
Three of China's biggest technology companies have quietly placed what looks like the largest single chip order in Nvidia's history — more than three million workstation GPUs with a sticker price above $35 billion. There is just one problem: Nvidia has told its own partners it cannot guarantee it can build them. That is the twist hiding inside Reuters' exclusive on Tuesday. ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent are not buying the datacentre monsters Washington spent four years banning. They are buying desk-side workstation cards — and that is exactly why the order slipped through the net. Photo: Two Nvidia Quadro 6000 workstation cards — older models, but the same idea Beijing is buying at scale: professional GPUs that sit outside datacentre export bans. The three-million-card order is for the far newer RTX PRO 5500. Credit: Jfmarck / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). The order nobody saw coming Update, Oct. 21: Since Reuters' exclusive, the specs picture has filled i...