Chinese technology companies purchased more than one million Nvidia gaming and workstation graphics cards over the past year, a Financial Times report says, underscoring a persistent dependence on U.S. silicon even as Beijing pours resources into a domestic alternative. The buying spree coincides with a domestic production shortfall that the FT's industry sources put at roughly 1.5 million chips.
Domestic output doubles but misses the mark
China's national AI strategy has doubled homegrown chip output this year to an expected 3.5 million units, the report notes. Demand from the country's largest tech platforms, however, "far exceeds" 5 million, leaving a gap that import-restricted data-center GPUs cannot fill. To bridge it, buyers are turning to Nvidia's gaming and workstation lines, primarily the RTX Pro 6000D, RTX Pro 5000 and the flagship RTX 5090, which remain compliant with current U.S. export controls.
Blackwell cards repurposed for lighter AI loads
Those Blackwell-architecture cards cannot match the raw throughput of Huawei's Ascend 910C, the sources said, but they are serviceable for simpler workloads such as prefilling. The preference also reflects software lock-in: Nvidia's CUDA stack is still regarded as more mature than Huawei's Cann alternative, keeping demand tilted toward the U.S. vendor even when domestic hardware is available.
Enthusiast market pays the premium
The diversion is visible in retail channels. The RTX 5090 carries a $1,999 list price but has all but vanished from standard shelves; only three third-party resellers list it, each at no less than $7,199. A separate recent report says Nvidia has halted 5090 production in favor of a 24 GB RTX 5080 flagship, a step down from the 5090's 32 GB, signaling that the high-end gaming segment is being reshaped by AI procurement priorities.