China considers allowing ByteDance, Alibaba to purchase Nvidia chips

China is exploring whether to let ByteDance and Alibaba purchase Nvidia’s RTX Pro 5500 chips, according to a report from The Information. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has reportedly asked select firms for detailed purchase plans, a move that suggests Beijing is at least cracking open the door to more Nvidia hardware flowing into the country. The catch: the RTX Pro 5500 is built for high-end professional workstations, not the massive data-center GPU clusters that power frontier AI training. Industry executives have noted that the workstation designation could make these chips less susceptible to the tightest restrictions. A careful dance around export controls Earlier in 2026, China conditionally approved ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent to import over 400,000 Nvidia H200 chips. By August, only about 10,000 H200 chips had actually been shipped to each of the approved companies — roughly 2.5% of the total green-lit volume split across ByteDance and Tencent alone. On the US side, regulators approved shipments of up to 75,000 H200 units for each of 10 Chinese firms, including Alibaba and Tencent, but oversight mechanisms kept actual volumes far below those ceiling...