Chinese tech firms bought over 1M Nvidia gaming, workstation GPUs in a year, FT reports
Chinese tech companies have bought more than 1 million Nvidia gaming and workstation GPUs this year to fill gaps in AI compute demand, according to a Financial Times report citing industry insiders. The chips are said to be mostly export-control-compliant models such as the RTX PRO 6000D, RTX PRO 5000 and RTX 5090, which lag Huawei's Ascend 910C and other domestic flagships on advanced AI work but remain useful for simpler workloads such as prefill. The report says China's domestic AI chip output roughly doubled this year to about 3.5 million units against demand well above 5 million, leaving a shortfall of nearly 1.5 million, and that Tencent has agreed to rent 100,000 GPUs in Southeast Asian data centers from Oracle, with ByteDance and Alibaba pursuing similar arrangements.
If accurate, the buying spree suggests China's biggest tech firms still depend heavily on Nvidia hardware despite export controls, while also squeezing the consumer graphics card market.