China weighs allowing ByteDance, Alibaba to purchase new Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 chips

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has asked major domestic tech firms—including ByteDance and Alibaba—to report their purchasing plans for Nvidia's newly unveiled RTX Pro 5500 workstation chip.

As the global race for artificial intelligence supremacy intensifies, tech giants in China are facing a massive potential turning point. 

With local domestic chips struggling to match high-end Western processing demands, Beijing is reportedly rethinking its rigid hardware strategy.

"US firms continue to be restricted by a combination of outdated US export controls, which cover gaming products released ⁠nearly a half a decade ago, and China's own limits on US imports," an Nvidia spokesperson said, when ⁠asked to comment on the report.

According to The Information, reports, Chinese regulators are weighing a major policy shift that could soon allow tech powerhouses like ByteDance and Alibaba to acquire Nvidia's advanced workstation graphics chips.

As reported, the State regulators have signaled an intent to approve these procurement requests, marking a potential easing of Beijing's strict domestic limits on U.S. hardware imports as local AI compute demands outpace what domestic suppliers like Huawei can provide.

Built on Nvidia’s advanced Blackwell architecture, industry executives expect the RTX Pro 5500 chip to cleverly bypass stringent U.S. export restrictions, offering a massive relief valve for Chinese cloud and AI giants hungry for high-end processing power.