❯ China signals it will let Alibaba and ByteDance buy Nvidia’s RTX Pro 5500, reopening big Chinese data centers to a new Nvidia card

Beijing asks for numbersAccording to The Information, as relayed by CNBC and Bloomberg, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently asked ByteDance, Alibaba and other companies to report their plans to buy Nvidia’s RTX Pro 5500, including quantities and intended uses, and told some of them the government intends to approve the purchases. ByteDance is reportedly weighing an order of about 1 million units, which could absorb two quarters of Nvidia’s planned China supply. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report; when approvals would come, how many chips would be allowed and on what criteria remain unclear.

A workstation cardThe RTX Pro 5500 is a Blackwell-based workstation GPU Nvidia launched this month, with 84GB of GDDR7 memory and a design that fits into server racks. According to Digital Today, U.S. export controls since October 2022 have targeted data-center AI chips, and because this card is classed as a workstation product, some industry executives expect it to fall outside the restrictions. Beijing had previously leaned toward tightening: in September 2025 the Cyberspace Administration told major tech companies to stop testing and cancel orders for Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000D.

Filling the compute gap with importsByteDance and Alibaba are training and serving large models at scale, and domestic chip output cannot yet keep up, so an Nvidia card they can legally buy is the most direct stopgap. Approval would ease their compute shortfall for now, but giving big buyers an import option also takes orders away from domestic chips, the very competition Alibaba’s T-Head bet in the next story has to face.

▪ SIGNALFrom halting the RTX Pro 6000D to asking for RTX Pro 5500 orders, Beijing is deciding Nvidia chips model by model, and how much it lets in depends on how much domestic chips can cover.