China Eyes Approval for Nvidia Chip Purchases Amid Trade Talks
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has signaled its intent to approve purchases of Nvidia's new RTX Pro 5500 chips by domestic firms, including Alibaba and ByteDance. This move comes after a recent Xi-Trump summit in Washington, where chip export controls were reportedly 'taken off the table' during trade talks.
The RTX Pro 5500 is a professional workstation GPU released this month, featuring 84 GB of GDDR7 memory and 21,760 CUDA cores, with a starting price above $6,000. Unlike data-center accelerators, which have been targeted by US export controls since October 2022, the RTX Pro 5500 sits outside this category, potentially giving Beijing greater regulatory latitude.
The Chinese government has asked domestic firms to report how many RTX Pro 5500 units they plan to purchase and what they would use them for. This move is seen as a sign that China may permit companies like Alibaba and ByteDance to buy the new Nvidia chips, despite previous restrictions on chip exports.