Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090, which shares its core design with the new RTX PRO 5500. Image: ZMASLO / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0, cropped
China’s government has signalled it could let some of its biggest tech companies, including TikTok owner ByteDance and Alibaba, buy Nvidia’s new RTX PRO 5500 chip, Reuters reports, citing The Information and two people familiar with the matter. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report.
What China is asking for
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently asked companies including ByteDance and Alibaba to report their plans to buy the chip, including how many they want and what they would use them for, Bloomberg adds. The ministry then told some of them that the government intends to approve the purchases.
That matters because Beijing has been one of the obstacles. As Nvidia itself points out, its sales to China are limited not just by US export rules but by China’s own limits on American imports.
What is the RTX PRO 5500?
Nvidia launched the RTX PRO 5500 on September 14. It’s a Blackwell graphics card for professional workstations, with the same 21,760 CUDA cores as the consumer GeForce RTX 5090 but 84GB of memory, more than two and a half times as much, according to TweakTown. That much memory makes it useful for running and fine-tuning AI models, not just graphics work.
It isn’t one of Nvidia’s top data centre AI chips, which remain restricted from sale to China. But some industry executives expect the RTX PRO 5500 to fall outside US export restrictions, according to The Information’s report.
Nvidia blames “outdated” rules
Asked about the report, an Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters that “US firms continue to be restricted by a combination of outdated US export controls, which cover gaming products released nearly a half a decade ago, and China’s own limits on US imports.” Alibaba and ByteDance did not immediately respond to Reuters.
The report comes days after Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met and agreed to start a US-China dialogue on AI, although Trump has since said he would rather not work with China on the technology.
Why it matters
If Beijing signs off, it would give Nvidia a legal route back into China’s AI market while its most powerful chips stay off limits, and give China’s biggest AI companies more computing power. It would also show China easing its own resistance to American chips just as the two countries start talking about AI.
