The Chinese government has indicated it may allow companies like Alibaba Group and ByteDance to buy Nvidia’s new RTX Pro 5500 chips, according to a report by The Information.
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reportedly asked domestic firms to report how many RTX Pro 5500 units they plan to purchase and what they would use them for, signaling intent to approve the transactions.
The RTX Pro 5500 is a Blackwell-generation professional workstation GPU with 84 GB of GDDR7 memory, sitting outside the data-center accelerator category that has been the primary target of U.S. export controls since October 2022.
The timing follows the Xi-Trump summit in Washington, at which chip export controls were conspicuously absent from both governments’ official readouts.
Experts warn that workstation GPUs clustered in servers could still accelerate domestic AI model training, raising questions about U.S. AI competitiveness.