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

The Chinese government has indicated it may allow domestic companies, including Alibaba and ByteDance, to purchase Nvidia's new RTX Pro 5500 chips. According to reports, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology asked these companies to report their plans to buy the chips, signaling an intention to approve the transactions.

The RTX Pro 5500 is a high-end professional computer chip, reportedly with 84 GB of GDDR7 memory and 21,760 CUDA cores, and a starting price above $6,000. This chip may be outside the scope of US export controls that have targeted data-center accelerator categories since October 2022.

The development follows a recent summit between US and Chinese leaders, where chip export controls were not mentioned as a topic of discussion. Nvidia's spokesperson stated that US firms are restricted by a combination of outdated US export controls and China's own limits on US imports. Alibaba and ByteDance did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Brief written by urgent.news from CNBC, CNBC World, Straits Times Business, Investing.com, Techmeme — 5 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.