China Considers Approval for Nvidia's RTX PRO 5500 GPUs
Nvidia's market access to China remains uncertain as Beijing considers allowing select Chinese firms to purchase Nvidia's RTX PRO 5500 GPUs.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reportedly asked companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, to submit plans to buy the chips. The ministry later informed some companies that it intends to approve the purchases, according to a report by The Information.
The RTX PRO 5500 is designed for high-end professional computing and is powerful enough for AI workloads. It falls outside current U.S. export restrictions, but China has its own limits on U.S. technology imports.
Nvidia is planning to begin shipments of the RTX PRO 5500 in late December, with 500,000 chips per quarter expected to be sent to China. ByteDance alone is considering an order of about 1 million chips, which would take approximately two quarters to fulfill.
The development comes amid a long-running standoff over Nvidia's ability to sell advanced processors in China. Washington has tightened restrictions on exporting high-performance AI chips to China, forcing Nvidia to develop modified products for the Chinese market.