China’s Nvidia Reversal Isn’t Really About Chips, It’s About Avoiding a Headline
Beijing is weighing approval for ByteDance and Alibaba to buy Nvidia's new RTX Pro 5500, but the chip's classification, not any real policy shift, is what's letting both governments avoid admitting they backed down.
China’s tech ministry has asked domestic giants including ByteDance and Alibaba for their purchase plans for Nvidia’s new RTX Pro 5500 chips, signaling plans to approve the orders, The Information reported.
Nvidia has not shipped meaningful data-center volume into China in over a year under both U.S. export restrictions and Chinese import guidance discouraging domestic firms from buying American chips.
The move also comes as Alibaba is simultaneously expanding its own AI hardware ambitions and plans for much larger AI models.
Reuters said it could not independently verify the report, and neither Beijing nor the companies involved has confirmed the plan publicly.
A Workstation Chip Doing a Data-Center Chip’s Job
The RTX Pro 5500 is officially a professional workstation GPU, built with 84GB of GDDR7 memory and 21,760 CUDA cores, and released commercially this month at a starting price above $6,000.
Washington continues to scrutinize any advanced lithography tools reaching China, and U.S. export controls since October 2022 have focused strictly on data-center accelerators.
This leaves workstation-class hardware in comparatively unregulated territory, a boundary some industry executives reportedly note would allow buyers to deploy the cards in server racks for AI workloads without violating sanctions.
Nvidia said in a statement that American firms remain squeezed by “outdated US export controls” alongside China’s own import limits, a carefully neutral response that avoids taking a side on whether this specific chip should count as restricted.
The Demand Number Nobody’s Talking About Yet
ByteDance is reportedly eyeing an order for 1 million RTX Pro 5500 units, a volume that would swallow roughly two quarters of Nvidia’s planned 500,000-unit-per-quarter China allocation before the Qwen owner even bids.
Nvidia’s sales staff have reportedly urged customers to lock in orders by September 30 to secure supply, and shipments aren’t expected to begin until late December.
That timeline means even a fast approval from Beijing won’t fix China’s immediate compute crunch; it merely shifts the barrier from policy clearance to physical allocation.
That gives a massive edge to Huawei, already striving to shatter U.S. restrictions, and Cambricon, two domestic giants that already command 80% of China’s AI server market and feel no pressure to ease Nvidia’s supply logjam.
Both Governments Get to Say Nothing Changed
The real story here isn’t a thaw in the U.S.-China chip standoff, but a face-saving technicality.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told CNBC export controls were “taken off the table” during the Xi-Trump talks, while China’s summit readout, per SCMP, listed eight deliverables without mentioning restrictions.
That mutual silence gives Beijing cover to approve workstation GPUs without abandoning its domestic guidance, while Washington can also claim its actual restricted category, the accelerators that power frontier AI training, remains untouched.
The timing of Nvidia’s $6,000 GPU simply allowed both nations to cool tensions without conceding ground, and Nvidia, still barred from its most lucrative China product line, gets to sell something rather than nothing.
Source: China Weighs Allowing Purchases of New Nvidia Chips
China weighs allowing ByteDance, Alibaba to buy new Nvidia chips
