China Eyes Approval for Nvidia Chip Sales to Alibaba and ByteDance
China's government has signaled that it may permit companies like Alibaba and ByteDance to buy Nvidia's new RTX Pro 5500 chips. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology asked domestic firms to report how many units they plan to purchase and what they would use them for, indicating an intent to approve the transactions.
The RTX Pro 5500 is a Blackwell-generation professional workstation GPU released this month, featuring 84 GB of GDDR7 memory and 21,760 CUDA cores. It has a starting price above $6,000, according to TechPowerUp.
The development comes after last week's Xi-Trump summit in Washington, where chip export controls were absent from official readouts. USTR Jamieson Greer told CNBC that export controls deemed national security issues were 'taken off the table' during trade talks.