China May Permit Alibaba and ByteDance to Purchase Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 AI Chips

China is weighing whether to let Alibaba and ByteDance buy Nvidia's new RTX Pro 5500 chips, according to a report by The Information that was relayed by Bloomberg, Reuters and others. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reportedly asked the companies to submit purchase plans and signaled that approval was likely. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report, Nvidia reiterated its standard statement on export controls, and ByteDance and Alibaba declined to comment.

The reported scale is large relative to supply. ByteDance is said to be considering an order of up to 1 million RTX Pro 5500 chips, while Nvidia is reportedly targeting production of about 500,000 chips per quarter for China, so one order could absorb roughly two quarters of planned output. The RTX Pro 5500 is a workstation-class part rather than Nvidia's flagship data center GPU, and Nvidia's China data center sales remain below 1% of that segment's revenue. Earlier approvals in this corridor have converted slowly: of more than 400,000 H200 chips China conditionally approved for ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent, only about 10,000 per company had shipped by August.

Chinese chip stocks fell on the report, since domestic suppliers stand to lose share if Beijing opens the door to Nvidia hardware. SMIC slid 3.7%, Moore Threads 6.3%, Cambricon 5.7% and NAURA 3.4%, and the CSI 300 dropped as much as 2.4%. For NVDA, BABA and ByteDance, the next markers are a formal decision from Beijing and whether Nvidia's reported plan to begin shipping in late December holds.