China May Allow Alibaba and ByteDance to Purchase Nvidia's New RTX Pro 5500 Chips

China is preparing to permit domestic technology firms, including Alibaba Group Holding and ByteDance, to purchase Nvidia's new RTX Pro 5500 graphics processing units. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has signaled its intent to approve the purchases and asked companies to submit intended use cases and planned order volumes. The Blackwell-generation workstation GPU, priced starting above $6,000, carries 84 GB of GDDR7 memory and 21,760 CUDA cores. Because it is categorized as a workstation chip rather than a data-center accelerator, it falls outside U.S. export restrictions enacted since October 2022.