China may allow Alibaba to buy Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 chips

The Chinese government has indicated it may permit companies including Alibaba Group Holding Limited and ByteDance Limited to purchase Nvidia's new RTX Pro 5500 chips, according to a report by The Information.

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reportedly asked domestic firms to declare how many RTX Pro 5500 units they intend to buy and what they would use them for. The request signals an intent by regulators to approve the transactions.

The RTX Pro 5500 is a Blackwell-generation professional workstation GPU released in September 2026. According to TechPowerUp, the chip features 84 GB of GDDR7 memory and 21,760 CUDA cores, with a starting price above $6,000. It falls outside the data-center accelerator category that has faced primary U.S. export controls since October 2022, which may give Beijing regulatory latitude to approve purchases without creating direct friction with Washington.

The move follows a summit between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, where chip export controls were absent from official readouts. USTR Jamieson Greer told CNBC that export controls linked to national security were taken off the table during trade discussions, and China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs made no mention of chip curbs among its eight summit deliverables.