China Asks ByteDance and Alibaba to Report Plans to Buy Nvidia's RTX PRO 5500

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has asked companies including ByteDance and Alibaba to report their plans to buy Nvidia's RTX PRO 5500 chips, and told some of them that the government intends to approve the purchases, The Information reported on September 27. Reuters, which relayed the report, said it could not immediately verify it.

What the ministry asked for

According to the report, which cited two people familiar with the matter, the ministry asked several companies how many chips they intend to buy and what they plan to do with them. Officials have told some firms that purchases could be approved, while the timing, volume limits and exact conditions remain unclear.

Why the RTX PRO 5500 matters

The RTX PRO 5500 is not Nvidia's most advanced AI accelerator. It is designed mainly for high-end professional computers and lacks some of the high-speed networking and memory found in the company's flagship data-centre GPUs. Chinese buyers still want it because it can be deployed in servers for AI inference, and some industry executives expect it to avoid US export restrictions.

ByteDance is reportedly considering an order of roughly one million RTX PRO 5500 chips to support AI workloads. Nvidia is targeting production of about 500,000 units per quarter for the Chinese market, so a single order of that size could absorb roughly two quarters of planned supply.

Nvidia's position

A spokesperson for Nvidia said US firms continue to be restricted by “a combination of outdated US export controls, which cover gaming products released nearly a half a decade ago, and China's own limits on US imports.”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' requests for comment, and the agency said it was not immediately able to reach the Chinese government.

The possible approval would not by itself reverse Nvidia's retreat from China. Sales of the H200, the chip at the centre of earlier licensing disputes, remain below 1% of the company's data-centre revenue, and CEO Jensen Huang has said Nvidia's share of China's advanced AI chip market effectively fell from around 95% to zero. An approval for the RTX PRO 5500 could still reopen an important sales channel as Nvidia expects chip demand to accelerate into 2027.