By Michael Douglass
Publication Date: 2026-10-26 15:50:00
Key Takeaways
ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have reportedly ordered more than $35 billion of NVIDIA’s export-compliant chips, and export-control expert Chris McGuire says Chinese companies can also legally rent US-made AI compute from data centers abroad, or even in the US.
NVIDIA probably won’t go after that rental demand, because it can’t make enough chips as it is and its guidance already assumes no China data center revenue.
The risk is that no one has measured how much Chinese demand already reaches NVIDIA through rentals, and the House has passed a bill that would put renting chips under export controls.
Analysts expect NVIDIA’s revenue to nearly double to $412 billion this fiscal year with no China data center sales in the guidance, and NVIDIA’s Nov. 17 report is the next thing to watch.
Chinese tech giants want NVIDIA (NVDA:NASDAQ) chips so badly that they’ll take the watered-down ones.
Alibaba (BABA:NYSE), ByteDance and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million of NVIDIA’s RTX PRO 5500 cards, a less powerful chip that complies with US export rules, with a sticker price of more than $35 billion, Reuters reported.
But export-control expert Chris McGuire says they don’t have to settle. As he put it on a recent episode of the MTS…
