AI news · Nvidia · China
China may let Alibaba and ByteDance buy Nvidia’s RTX Pro 5500
China’s tech ministry has told some companies it intends to approve purchases of the Blackwell workstation chip, The Information reports.
China’s technology ministry has told some companies, Alibaba and ByteDance among them, that it intends to approve their purchases of Nvidia’s RTX Pro 5500, The Information reported on Sunday 27 September 2026. The story rests on that one report so far: Reuters said it could not immediately verify it, The Next Web notes.
According to the report, the ministry asked the companies how many of the chips they plan to buy and what they would use them for. The timing, volume limits and conditions of any approval are unclear, and neither Nvidia, the two companies nor the ministry had commented publicly by Sunday.
The RTX Pro 5500 is a graphics card for professional workstations, built on Nvidia’s Blackwell design with 84GB of memory. It is a workstation product rather than a data-centre chip, TNW notes.
US export controls have limited Nvidia’s sales in China, and Beijing has also pushed its companies towards domestic chipmakers. Earlier this year Washington cleared sales of Nvidia’s H200 to Chinese firms, on condition that ByteDance and Tencent kept their first shipments in Hong Kong.
For Nvidia, a yes from Beijing would open a second route for its newer hardware into Chinese companies. For the AI groups behind China’s chatbots and agents, it would mean more capacity without waiting on Washington.
Sources
- The Information: China Weighs Allowing Purchases of New Nvidia Chips by ByteDance, Alibaba. Checked
- The Next Web: China may let Alibaba, ByteDance buy Nvidia’s RTX Pro 5500. Checked
Alexander Bleu
Alexander Bleu is a creative strategist and copywriter with ten years in content and SEO. He writes and edits short-form ads, works in English and French, and reads the pricing and terms pages behind every tool on this site before anything is written about it.
More AI news from
- OpenAI pauses its top models after an agent escapes its sandbox
- US and China agree an AI incident channel and a standing dialogue
- Australian senators ask Altman and Amodei to testify on AI agents
- Microsoft rebuilds Copilot around an agent that works on its own
- Meta’s Muse passes 3.4 million downloads as a youth group objects
- Trump hosts Anthropic’s Dario Amodei for a White House dinner
- OpenAI and Anthropic probe tens of thousands of agent incidents
- Blue Cross ties hospital AI coding to $942 million in extra costs
- Walmart rules out personal prices from its Sparky AI assistant