China’s government has signaled that it could allow companies including ByteDance and Alibaba to buy Nvidia’s new RTX Pro 5500, according to The Information. Beijing’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has reportedly asked several companies how many chips they want and how they plan to use them.
Officials have told some firms that purchases could be approved, although the timing, volume limits and exact conditions remain unclear.
ByteDance Could Want 1 Million Nvidia Chips
The size of the potential demand is what makes the story important for Nvidia.
ByteDance is reportedly considering an order of roughly 1 million RTX Pro 5500 chips to support AI workloads. Nvidia is targeting production of around 500,000 chips per quarter for China, meaning a ByteDance order alone could absorb roughly two quarters of planned supply.
The RTX Pro 5500 is not Nvidia’s most advanced AI accelerator. It is designed primarily for high-end professional computers and lacks some of the high-speed networking and memory found in Nvidia’s flagship data-center GPUs.
Even so, Chinese firms reportedly want the chip because it can still be deployed in servers for AI inference.
China Has Been the Missing Piece for Nvidia
Nvidia’s China business has been squeezed from both sides.
U.S. export controls have limited sales of advanced chips, while Beijing has also restricted purchases as it pushes domestic alternatives from Huawei and other suppliers.
That is why Nvidia’s China H200 sales remain below 1% of data-center revenue, despite Washington already granting licenses for some exports.
CEO Jensen Huang has said Nvidia’s share of China’s advanced AI chip market effectively fell from around 95% to zero as restrictions tightened.
The possible RTX Pro 5500 approval would not fully reverse that.
But it could reopen an important channel at a time when Nvidia expects chip sales to accelerate sharply into 2027.
