Nvidia Sees Breakthrough in China as Beijing Considers Approval for RTX Pro 5500

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has signaled approval for major tech firms to purchase Nvidia's newly released RTX Pro 5500 workstation graphics processors. This decision could reopen a meaningful channel for Nvidia in China, where its advanced AI accelerator sales have been frozen by export restrictions.

The RTX Pro 5500 is a high-end GPU with 84 GB of GDDR7 memory and 21,760 CUDA cores. TechPowerUp reported that it has a starting price above $6,000.

ByteDance Limited, one of the companies asked to report its intended purchase, is reportedly weighing an order of approximately 1 million RTX Pro 5500 chips to support AI inference workloads. This would account for about two quarters of Nvidia's planned supply in China.

Nvidia's position in China has been squeezed from both directions: U.S. export controls have restricted sales, while Beijing has discouraged purchases to promote domestic alternatives. A green light for the RTX Pro 5500 could restore an important revenue stream for Nvidia at a moment when it expects chip sales to accelerate sharply into 2027.