Chinese AI firms ordered $70B of Nvidia RTX chips but may get 1%

Chinese AI developers expect to receive only about 1% of the roughly $70 billion of Nvidia RTX chips they have ordered, Bloomberg reported. It says Nvidia is struggling to raise production fast enough to meet demand.

What Bloomberg’s headline and summary say

According to Bloomberg’s public summary, Chinese AI developers expect just a small fraction of the advanced chips they ordered over the next several months. The 1% share and the $70 billion order total appear in the headline. The article itself was not accessible to us, so we cannot say which RTX model it covers, which buyers are involved, or how Bloomberg obtained the numbers. Nvidia has not confirmed the figures in anything we have read, and nothing here comes from an Nvidia statement.

A second squeeze on China business

The report follows another Bloomberg item a day earlier, which relayed a Financial Times story. Bloomberg’s headline on that piece says Nvidia told data center clients to trim their China business. Techmeme’s summary of the FT report, citing its sources, says the instruction was given verbally and asked cloud compute clients to sell more than half of their services to non-Chinese companies. We have not seen Nvidia confirm that either.

Read together, the two reports describe pressure on Chinese buyers from two sides: limited supply of the chips, and limits on how much of Nvidia-powered cloud capacity can go to Chinese customers. Both rest on unnamed or unseen sources, so they should be treated as media reports, not company decisions.

Open questions the headline leaves unanswered

The summary says Nvidia is struggling to scale up output, which points to supply and not to a policy decision as the cause of the gap. But the public text does not say whether export rules, Beijing’s approval of purchases or manufacturing capacity is the main limit. It also does not give a delivery schedule beyond “the next several months”, nor does it say how the $70 billion total was counted: firm purchase orders, requests or expressions of interest can differ widely.

For readers outside China, the practical question is whether scarce supply pushes the chips’ price up and slows Chinese AI projects that rely on them. The sources we read do not say. Nvidia’s broader product pipeline, including the platform we covered when Nvidia fast-tracked Vera Rubin, will compete for the same manufacturing resources, though no source we read links the two directly.

Until Nvidia, its customers or Bloomberg’s full article add detail, the 1% figure is a headline claim about expectations, not a confirmed shipment number.