Story
China Signals Approval for Tech Giants to Buy New Nvidia Workstation GPUs, Report Says
Summary
China's government has reportedly asked firms like Alibaba and ByteDance about their plans to purchase Nvidia's new RTX Pro 5500, a powerful workstation chip that falls outside the scope of current U.S. data-center export controls.
The Chinese government has signaled it may permit major technology companies, including Alibaba Group and ByteDance, to purchase a new professional-grade graphics card from Nvidia, according to a report from *The Information*. This potential approval could provide Chinese firms with access to powerful new hardware amid stringent U.S. export controls on high-end data-center chips.
A Potential Opening
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has reportedly asked domestic companies to detail their planned purchase volumes and use cases for Nvidia’s RTX Pro 5500 GPU. This inquiry is being interpreted as a preliminary step toward approving the transactions for the recently released chip.
The RTX Pro 5500 is a significant piece of hardware, but it is categorized as a professional workstation GPU rather than a data-center accelerator—the primary target of U.S. restrictions. Key specifications for the Blackwell-generation chip include:
- 21,760 CUDA cores
- 84 GB of GDDR7 memory
- A starting price reported to be over $6,000, according to TechPowerUp
AdNavigating U.S. Export Controls
By focusing on a workstation-class chip, Beijing may be able to greenlight these purchases without directly challenging the U.S. export control regime that has been in place since October 2022. The regulations have largely aimed to restrict China's access to top-tier AI accelerators used in large-scale data centers for training advanced artificial intelligence models.
This development follows a recent high-level summit between U.S. and Chinese leaders where chip export controls were reportedly not a central topic of discussion. USTR Jamieson Greer told CNBC that controls related to national security were "taken off the table" during trade negotiations. Similarly, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not list export controls among its official summit deliverables, the *South China Morning Post* reported.
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