China Signals It Will Let ByteDance and Alibaba Buy Nvidia's New RTX Pro 5500 Chips

Beijing's tech ministry asked ByteDance and Alibaba how many Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 chips they plan to buy — and said it intends to approve the purchases, reopening a market Nvidia had all but lost.

China's government has signalled it may let the country's biggest technology firms buy a new Nvidia chip after all, a shift that would prise open a market the US chipmaker has all but lost.

The Information reported on Sunday that China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently asked companies including ByteDance and Alibaba how many of Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 chips they planned to buy, and what for. The ministry told at least some of them that it intends to approve the purchases, according to two people familiar with the matter cited by the outlet.

The RTX Pro 5500 is a workstation graphics card Nvidia unveiled this month, built on its Blackwell design with 84GB of memory. Industry executives quoted in the report expect the chip to slip past US export restrictions — which is why Beijing's blessing matters at all.

China requires companies to win government approval before buying Nvidia chips, a lever meant to protect domestic semiconductor makers and limit reliance on American technology. Stacked on top of US export controls, the curb had squeezed Nvidia almost entirely out of the Chinese market; the company has said its China data-centre share has fallen to effectively zero.

Washington, for its part, has swung between allowing and blocking sales. Earlier this year it cleared shipments of Nvidia's more powerful H200 accelerators to China and licensed roughly ten Chinese firms to buy them — but with strings attached. ByteDance and Tencent were told to keep their first H200 shipments in Hong Kong rather than bring them into the mainland.

Nvidia declined to confirm the report but pointed the finger at policy on both sides. A spokesperson said US firms "continue to be restricted by a combination of outdated US export controls, which cover gaming products released nearly a half a decade ago, and China's own limits on US imports." Alibaba, ByteDance and the Chinese government did not respond to requests for comment; Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report, and none of the named parties had commented publicly by Sunday night.

The backdrop is a compute crunch. China's AI labs are short of the hardware needed to train and run frontier models, and the RTX Pro 5500 — a professional card rather than a headline data-centre GPU — would ease that pressure without conceding Beijing's self-reliance drive. For Nvidia, it is a narrow door back into a market it once counted among its largest.

Sources: CNBC | The Next Web | Business Times | Straits Times