Chinese technology companies have reportedly purchased more than one million Nvidia gaming and workstation chips, mainly RTX 5090 and RTX Pro models, to run basic AI workloads, according to sources cited by the Financial Times and relayed by Techmeme. The buying spree happened despite ongoing export tensions and a global shortage of dedicated AI accelerators.
The revelation lands in a turbulent week for the semiconductor industry. A broad chip stock sell-off deepened after Broadcom's CEO compared AI investing to a casino, with Samsung falling as much as 8.8 percent, SK Hynix dropping 9.2 percent and Micron losing 4 percent, the Financial Times reported. Meanwhile, at the OCP Global Summit in San Jose, Nvidia opened its Vera Rubin architecture to partners including Cisco, Google, Meta and Microsoft to help scale AI factories worldwide.
Nvidia RTX 5090 and RTX Pro demand from China
The reported purchases highlight how Chinese firms are working around restricted access to Nvidia's top-tier data center GPUs. The RTX 5090 is a consumer gaming card, while RTX Pro covers workstation-class graphics, but both can handle entry-level or small-scale AI training and inference when pooled in large numbers.
Nvidia has not commented publicly on the report, and the exact buyers and delivery timelines remain unclear. The scale of the reported order, over one million units, suggests demand is coming from multiple companies rather than a single player. It also raises questions about how long global RTX 5090 supply can meet both gaming and AI demand.
Why chip stocks are falling
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan's casino comparison struck a nerve with investors already nervous about the pace and scale of AI capital expenditure. The sell-off hit memory and logic chip makers hard, with Samsung and SK Hynix, both key suppliers of high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators, among the worst performers.
