China Weighs Letting ByteDance and Alibaba Buy Nvidia's RTX PRO 5500 Chips

China is weighing whether to let its biggest technology companies buy Nvidia's newest workstation graphics card — a possible second leg of chip-trade easing after January's H200 opening. The Information reported Sunday that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has asked companies including ByteDance and Alibaba to detail their plans to buy the RTX PRO 5500, and told some of them that the government intends to approve the purchases. Reuters carried the report but said it could not independently verify it.

A workstation card with data-center ambitions

Nvidia markets the RTX PRO 5500 Blackwell Workstation Edition as a professional graphics card for artificial intelligence, simulation and graphics work, with 84 gigabytes of GDDR7 memory, 21,760 CUDA cores and a starting price above six thousand dollars, according to the company's product page, which still lists the card as coming soon. It connects over a standard expansion slot and is designed for rack-mounted workstation deployment, while Nvidia's leading data-center accelerators use a faster stacked memory technology instead. The category line is exactly what makes it interesting: some buyers reportedly plan to install multiple cards in servers to run artificial-intelligence workloads, which would put workstation hardware to data-center use.

Beijing asks, Washington's rules still bind

According to the report, the industry ministry recently asked the companies how many cards they intend to buy and how they would deploy them, in what amounts to a case-by-case approval process. The ministry then told some of them that Beijing intends to approve the purchases, though timing, volume limits and exact conditions remain unresolved. Some industry executives expect the card to fall outside current United States export restrictions, which since October 2022 have targeted data-center accelerators rather than professional graphics cards — but no authority has confirmed that reading. "US firms continue to be restricted by a combination of outdated US export controls, which cover gaming products released nearly half a decade ago, and China's own limits on US imports," an Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters. Alibaba and ByteDance did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment, and Reuters said it could not reach the Chinese government.

The H200 precedent: approval is not delivery

This would not be Beijing's first such opening. In late January, China gave ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent the nod to import more than 400,000 H200 chips combined, after Washington cleared sales of the chip. The United States Commerce Department later formalized the arrangement with licenses for roughly ten Chinese buyers, each capped at 75,000 chips. Then the gap between permission and product opened up: by mid-May, not a single H200 had been delivered, and Chinese firms pulled back from finalizing purchases after guidance from Beijing. The lesson for the RTX PRO 5500 is direct — a government willing to approve is not the same as chips shipped.

Approval, volumes, and Washington's verdict

Whether Beijing turns the reported willingness into formal approvals, and on what volumes and conditions. The Information reported that ByteDance is weighing an order of roughly one million units — about two quarters of Nvidia's targeted production of some 500,000 chips per quarter for China — with shipments expected to begin in late December, figures Reuters did not carry in its own wire. Also unresolved is whether Washington agrees the workstation card clears its export rules. Nvidia's shares rose in overnight trading Sunday after the report, then reversed to trade about 0.4 percent lower — the market, like the regulators, waiting for confirmation.