China's industry ministry has asked ByteDance and Alibaba to submit their purchase plans for Nvidia's RTX PRO 5500 chips and told some companies it intends to approve them, The Information reported on Sunday, in a move that could reopen a significant channel for AI chip sales into China.
According to the report, cited by Asianet News, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology collected purchase plans from major technology companies and then indicated to some of them that approvals were likely. None of the companies involved, nor the ministry, has confirmed the development publicly.
What the chip is
The RTX PRO 5500 is a professional-grade, workstation-class GPU designed for graphics and AI workloads, and it is different from the data-centre accelerators that sit at the centre of US export restrictions. Industry executives told The Information the chip does not fall under current US export controls on China — which is why the potential approval matters: it would give Chinese tech giants access to high-performance Nvidia hardware through a category Washington has not restricted.
The scale of the demand
The report said ByteDance alone is considering buying nearly one million of the chips, with deliveries expected to begin in late December at a pace of about 500,000 units per quarter. The chips are priced at 85,000 to 90,000 yuan each — roughly $13,000 — and eight chips are needed to assemble a server, pointing to a major infrastructure build-out if the plans go ahead.
Nvidia shares initially rose in overnight trading on the report before giving back the gains to trade 0.4 per cent lower. An Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters that the US export-control system is outdated and called for rules that let American companies sell more broadly.
The report remains unverified by any official source, and it is not yet clear how broadly Beijing would apply any approvals.
Sources:
Asianet News (citing The Information): https://newsable.asianetnews.com/am...-buy-some-nvidia-ai-chips-articleshow-o5z3fg2
According to the report, cited by Asianet News, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology collected purchase plans from major technology companies and then indicated to some of them that approvals were likely. None of the companies involved, nor the ministry, has confirmed the development publicly.
What the chip is
The RTX PRO 5500 is a professional-grade, workstation-class GPU designed for graphics and AI workloads, and it is different from the data-centre accelerators that sit at the centre of US export restrictions. Industry executives told The Information the chip does not fall under current US export controls on China — which is why the potential approval matters: it would give Chinese tech giants access to high-performance Nvidia hardware through a category Washington has not restricted.
The scale of the demand
The report said ByteDance alone is considering buying nearly one million of the chips, with deliveries expected to begin in late December at a pace of about 500,000 units per quarter. The chips are priced at 85,000 to 90,000 yuan each — roughly $13,000 — and eight chips are needed to assemble a server, pointing to a major infrastructure build-out if the plans go ahead.
Nvidia shares initially rose in overnight trading on the report before giving back the gains to trade 0.4 per cent lower. An Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters that the US export-control system is outdated and called for rules that let American companies sell more broadly.
The report remains unverified by any official source, and it is not yet clear how broadly Beijing would apply any approvals.
Sources:
Asianet News (citing The Information): https://newsable.asianetnews.com/am...-buy-some-nvidia-ai-chips-articleshow-o5z3fg2
