China weighs allowing Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 purchases by Alibaba and ByteDance

China’s government is considering allowing some domestic technology companies to buy Nvidia’s new RTX Pro 5500, potentially reopening a path into a market squeezed by restrictions from both Beijing and Washington.

The Information reports that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology asked companies including Alibaba and ByteDance how many chips they want and how they intend to use them. Officials told some prospective buyers that the purchases are expected to be approved, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Approval is not settled. The timing, permitted quantities and standards for deciding which buyers qualify remain unclear. The U.S. government has also not publicly confirmed whether the product falls outside its export restrictions.

ByteDance is considering an order of about 1 million chips

ByteDance is weighing a purchase of roughly 1 million RTX Pro 5500 units, The Information reports, with some potential customers planning eight-chip servers for running AI models. Nvidia is targeting about 500,000 units per quarter for China and aims to begin shipments in late December, meaning an order of that size could take two quarters to fill.

The chips are expected to cost 85,000 yuan to 90,000 yuan, or about $13,000, in China. Nvidia describes the RTX Pro line as workstation hardware rather than its fastest data-center AI platform. The 5500 lacks the high-speed interconnects and premium memory used by Nvidia’s leading accelerator systems, but customers still see it as useful for inference.