China Eases Restrictions on Nvidia's High-End Chips
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has signaled that it may allow companies such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to buy Nvidia Corp.'s RTX Pro 5500 chips. The move is a potential breakthrough for Chinese AI developers, who rely on Nvidia but are struggling with a persistent shortage of capable AI chips. Unlike Nvidia's top-of-the-line accelerators, the RTX Pro 5500 is designed mainly for graphics and simulations, though it can also support AI services.
The ministry asked some companies to report on their plans to purchase the high-end graphics processor released this month, including how many and what they would use the product for. It told some of the firms that it intends to approve the purchases. The US administration recently lifted restrictions on some Nvidia chips, but those tend to be older-generation chips sold in small quantities.
The RTX Pro 5500 is a processor built on an older-generation process and is designed to provide workstation computation at scale. Chinese AI developers often employ a mix of semiconductors from both foreign and local suppliers to train frontier large language models.