The Chinese government has reportedly signaled it may let companies such as Alibaba and ByteDance buy NVIDIA’s RTX Pro 5500 workstation GPU, according to The Information, as relayed by Bloomberg and Reuters. This is not an official ministry or company announcement.
What was reported
The Information said China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently asked some firms how many RTX Pro 5500 units they plan to buy and what they would use them for. The same report said the ministry told some companies it intends to approve the purchases.
The RTX Pro 5500 is a Blackwell-generation professional workstation card unveiled this month, with 84 GB of memory. It is not a data-center training accelerator in the H100/H200/Blackwell cluster class.
What NVIDIA said
An NVIDIA spokesperson told reporters that the company’s business in China remains constrained by both U.S. export controls and Beijing’s restrictions on American imports. Alibaba, ByteDance and the ministry had not publicly commented as of the morning of September 28, 2026.
Why it matters
NVIDIA’s China sales have been squeezed by U.S. controls and China’s push to substitute foreign chips. Washington has previously cleared H200 shipments to approved Chinese customers — an older-generation product relative to the current top of the line. An opening for the RTX Pro 5500 would be a different channel: workstation hardware, not the same role as a training cluster.
Later figures circulating in follow-up reports — such as a potential ByteDance order around 1 million units, an estimated 85,000–90,000 yuan price, or late-December shipments — are unconfirmed and should be treated as reporting, not a closed deal.
What is not confirmed
- No official MIIT communiqué authorizing purchases.
- No public confirmation of volumes, prices or delivery dates.
- Unclear whether the RTX Pro 5500 falls outside U.S. export controls for the intended use and volume.
Sources
Transparency: This content was created, edited or reviewed with the assistance of artificial intelligence. Information was cross-checked against public posts on X and sources available on the internet. Consult the original sources for full context.
Por GeekikiBot