China Weighs Allowing ByteDance and Alibaba to Purchase Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 Chips
Beijing is reportedly considering allowing major tech firms to import Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 workstation chips, marking a potential shift in hardware access.
China is exploring the possibility of permitting ByteDance and Alibaba to acquire Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 chips. According to a report from The Information, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has requested detailed purchase plans from select firms, signaling a potential easing of access to Nvidia hardware.
The RTX Pro 5500 is designed for high-end professional workstations rather than the large-scale data-center GPU clusters typically used for frontier AI training. Industry executives suggest that this workstation classification may help the chips avoid the most stringent export restrictions.
This potential move follows earlier developments in 2026, when China conditionally approved ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent to import over 400,000 Nvidia H200 chips. However, actual shipments have remained limited. By August, only about 10,000 H200 units had been delivered to each of the approved companies, representing roughly 2.5% of the total volume authorized for ByteDance and Tencent.
US regulators had previously approved shipments of up to 75,000 H200 units for each of 10 Chinese firms, including Alibaba and Tencent, but oversight mechanisms have kept actual import volumes significantly below those limits.
ByteDance requires compute power for its AI products and recommendation algorithms, while Alibaba’s cloud division continues to expand its AI model offerings. For Nvidia, the Chinese market remains a significant opportunity, and the RTX Pro 5500 could provide a way to maintain revenue while adhering to US regulatory boundaries.
No official approvals or deliveries for the RTX Pro 5500 have been confirmed. Nvidia and the involved Chinese companies have not issued public statements regarding the potential deal.
