China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has asked companies including ByteDance and Alibaba Group Holding to report their plans to purchase Nvidia Corp.'s RTX Pro 5500 chips, according to a report by the Information citing two people familiar with the matter1,2. The ministry told some Chinese companies the government intends to approve the purchases.
The RTX Pro 5500 is a chip built for high-end professional computers. Some industry executives expect the chip to avoid U.S. export restrictions, according to the Information's report.
An Nvidia Corp. spokesperson, asked for comment, said: "US firms continue to be restricted by a combination of outdated US export controls, which cover gaming products released nearly half a decade ago, and China's own limits on US imports". Alibaba Group Holding and ByteDance did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and the Chinese government could not immediately be reached for comment.
ANALYSIS Beijing's posture here is notable for its specificity: rather than issuing a blanket policy on foreign chip imports, the ministry is soliciting purchase plans from named companies and signaling approval on a per-product basis. That approach gives the Chinese government granular control over which Nvidia Corp. products enter the domestic market and in what volumes.
The distinction between a workstation-class chip like the RTX Pro 5500 and data-center accelerators subject to tighter U.S. controls is central to the expected regulatory treatment. If the chip falls outside the performance thresholds set by U.S. export rules, Beijing's approval would not require a corresponding U.S. license, creating a narrow but commercially meaningful channel for Nvidia Corp. sales into China.
For ByteDance and Alibaba Group Holding, access to the RTX Pro 5500 would expand the hardware options available for professional computing and inference workloads that do not require top-tier data-center GPUs, though the scale of planned purchases has not been detailed in the reporting.
The Information's Qianer Liu first reported the development.