A Financial Times report, summarized by Tom's Hardware, says Chinese tech companies bought more than 1 million Nvidia gaming and workstation GPUs over the past year. The purchases are meant to fill gaps in AI compute capacity while China's domestic chip industry scales up. The article relies on a single FT report, so there are no conflicting accounts to compare.
Domestic AI chip production is expected to double this year, but output of 3.5 million chips still falls short of demand that exceeds 5 million, leaving a shortfall of nearly 1.5 million. The imported Nvidia cards are mostly RTX Pro 6000D, RTX Pro 5000, and RTX 5090 models, which comply with U.S. export controls. They are less powerful than Huawei's Ascend 910C for flagship AI work, but can handle simpler tasks such as prefilling.
The report says CUDA software is a major reason Nvidia GPUs remain attractive compared with Huawei's Cann alternative. Meanwhile, the buying pressure is hitting the enthusiast GPU market: RTX 5090 cards are scarce and third-party resellers list them at around $7,199, well above the $1,999 MSRP. Nvidia has reportedly halted RTX 5090 production, with a 24GB RTX 5080 expected to take over as flagship.