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China May Permit Alibaba and ByteDance to Purchase Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 GPUs
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China Signals Potential Approval for Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 Purchases
On September 27, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology asked domestic firms, including Alibaba Group Holding Limited and ByteDance Limited, to report the quantity of Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 graphics cards they intend to buy and the intended uses. The ministry indicated to some companies that the government plans to approve those purchases. Reuters and other outlets could not independently verify the report.
Context of U.S. Export Controls
Since October 2022, the United States has imposed successive export-control rounds that restrict Chinese access to high-performance data-center GPUs. Those controls have limited Nvidia’s sales in China, while Beijing has also imposed its own curbs to protect domestic chipmakers. Earlier in the year, the United States cleared sales of Nvidia’s H200 chips to Chinese firms, but the RTX Pro 5500 falls outside the data-center accelerator category that has been the primary focus of the export regime.
Chip Specifications and Cost
The RTX Pro 5500 is a Blackwell-generation professional workstation GPU released this month. It features 84 GB of GDDR7 memory, 21,760 CUDA cores, and a starting price reported above $6,000, according to TechPowerUp.
Official Reactions
A Nvidia spokesperson said U.S. firms continue to be restricted by a combination of outdated U.S. export controls and China’s own limits on U.S. imports. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told CNBC that export-control issues were “taken off the table” during the recent Xi-Trump summit, and China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs made no mention of export controls in its list of summit deliverables.
Potential Implications
If the approvals proceed, Alibaba and ByteDance could deploy the RTX Pro 5500 in high-end professional computing environments without triggering the latest U.S. export restrictions. This would give Beijing greater regulatory latitude in acquiring advanced graphics hardware, potentially narrowing the technology gap that U.S. controls aim to maintain and influencing future U.S.–China trade negotiations.