Report: China May Greenlight ByteDance, Alibaba Purchases of Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 AI Chips

China is signaling it could permit companies including ByteDance and Alibaba to buy Nvidia's new RTX Pro 5500 chips, The Information reported. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has reportedly canvassed several firms on expected order volumes and intended use cases. Some companies have been told approvals are possible, though the timing, volume caps, and specific terms remain uncertain. Potential demand is what makes the development notable for Nvidia. ByteDance is said to be weighing an order of about 1 million RTX Pro 5500 chips for AI workloads. Nvidia is reportedly aiming to produce roughly 500,000 units per quarter for China, which would mean a ByteDance order alone could consume about two quarters of planned supply. The RTX Pro 5500 is not Nvidia's top-tier AI accelerator. Built primarily for high-end professional workstations, it lacks some of the high-speed networking and memory features found in the company's flagship datacenter GPUs. Even so, Chinese buyers reportedly see it as attractive because it can still be deployed in servers for AI inference. China has become a tougher market for Nvidia. U.S. export controls have constrained sales of advanced chips, while Beijing has also tightened purchasing as it promotes domestic alternatives from Huawei and other suppliers. As a result, Nvidia's H200 sales in China remain below 1% of datacenter revenue, even though Washington has already issued licenses for certain exports. CEO Jensen Huang has said Nvidia's share of China's advanced AI chip market effectively fell from about 95% to zero as restrictions intensified. Any approval for the RTX Pro 5500 would not fully restore that position, but it could reopen a meaningful sales channel as Nvidia expects chip revenue growth to accelerate sharply through 2027.