China Weighs Letting ByteDance, Alibaba Buy New Nvidia Chips

China’s government is weighing whether to let ByteDance and Alibaba buy a new class of Nvidia chips, according to a report from The Information that was relayed by Reuters on Sunday. Reuters said it could not independently verify the report. The chip in question, Nvidia’s RTX Pro 5500, sits outside the category of data-center AI accelerators that Washington has targeted with successive rounds of export controls since October 2022.

What is being reported

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has asked domestic firms, including ByteDance and Alibaba, to report how many RTX Pro 5500 units they intend to purchase and what they plan to use them for, The Information reported. That kind of pre-clearance request is typically a signal that Beijing intends to approve the transactions rather than block them.

The RTX Pro 5500 is a professional workstation GPU built on Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture, released this month, with 84 GB of GDDR7 memory. It is marketed for rendering, design, and inference workloads rather than the large-scale AI model training that data-center chips such as Nvidia’s H20 and Blackwell-based B-series accelerators are built for. Because it falls outside that data-center category, Beijing may have more room to approve its purchase without directly contradicting the restrictions Chinese regulators themselves have placed on some categories of foreign AI hardware in recent years, or triggering a fresh round of friction with Washington over chip access.

Where this fits with the export-control fight

The Nvidia chip question has been a recurring flashpoint in the broader US-China technology relationship this year. Trump rejected a proposal for deeper US-China AI integration last week, one sign that chip and AI policy remain unresolved even as the two governments have found common ground on other fronts. That meeting followed the Xi-Trump summit, where trade, AI, and chip access were on the agenda alongside Taiwan and Iran — and where, notably, chip export controls were absent from both governments’ official readouts, according to reporting on the summit’s tariff and AI dialogue.

Nvidia’s access to the Chinese market has whipsawed over the past two years as Washington has tightened and loosened licensing rules for different chip tiers, and as Beijing has separately encouraged domestic firms to reduce reliance on US silicon in favor of homegrown alternatives. A decision to greenlight RTX Pro 5500 purchases would not reverse that broader push toward chip self-sufficiency, but it would suggest Chinese regulators see workstation-class hardware as a lower-stakes category than the data-center accelerators at the center of the dispute.

The regional stakes

Any easing of China’s own restrictions on Nvidia purchases lands against a backdrop of hardened US-China competition over advanced technology and its military applications. Taiwan, home to the foundries that manufacture the chips at the center of the dispute, has continued to press Washington on defense needs amid the broader standoff. Semiconductor supply chains running through Taiwan remain a central variable in how both Washington and Beijing calculate the cost of escalation in the Taiwan Strait.

For ByteDance and Alibaba, both of which run large consumer platforms and cloud businesses that depend on GPU compute, access to any additional category of Nvidia hardware — even chips built for workstations rather than data centers — would ease a supply constraint that Chinese tech firms have managed for several years through a mix of stockpiling, domestic substitutes, and narrower approved import channels.

What is not yet confirmed

Neither the Chinese government nor Nvidia has publicly confirmed the report. Reuters, which relayed The Information’s account, said it had not independently verified the details. There is no confirmation yet of a timeline for a decision, the volume of chips involved, or whether approval would extend beyond ByteDance and Alibaba to other Chinese technology firms. America Strikes will update this article if Beijing, Nvidia, or the companies named issue statements.