China weighs allowing ByteDance, Alibaba to buy new Nvidia chips, The Information reports

Chinese authorities may permit e-commerce giant Alibaba and video streaming platform ByteDance to acquire Nvidia's latest RTX Pro 5500 GPU chips, according to a report by The Information. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reportedly requested domestic companies to disclose their intended purchases and intended usage of the RTX Pro 5500, a professional-grade workstation GPU.

Released this month, the RTX Pro 5500 boasts 84GB of GDDR7 memory and 21,760 CUDA cores, with a starting price exceeding $6,000, as reported by TechPowerUp. Positioned outside the data-center accelerator category that has been subject to U.S. export controls since October 2022, China's regulatory oversight could be more lenient, potentially avoiding further strain on U.S.-China relations.

This development comes after the Xi-Trump summit in Washington, where chip export controls were notably absent from both nations' official statements. The USTR's Jamieson Greer confirmed that export controls were deemed non-issues during trade discussions, and China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not mention export controls in its post-summit announcement.