ByteDance, Alibaba to be allowed by China’s govt. to buy new Nvidia chips

ByteDance, Alibaba, and other Chinese firms may receive official permission from China's government to acquire Nvidia's latest RTX PRO 5500 chips, according to The Information. The report, based on unnamed sources, suggests that China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is requesting companies to disclose their plans for purchasing the chip.

The government is reportedly expected to approve these purchases. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has urged the U.S. administration to permit his company's chips to be sold in China, emphasizing the importance of competition in the Asian market. Simultaneously, the Chinese government has been urging its tech giants to investigate the use of domestic alternatives to reduce their reliance on U.S. technology that could be subject to abrupt export restrictions.

Meanwhile, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and other technology experts have advocated for chip restrictions against China. "We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China," he stated in an open letter in July. "China lacks domestic production capacity, and therefore, due to scaling laws, cannot produce more powerful models than the US without US chips."

Nvidia's spokesperson noted "outdated" U.S. export controls affecting the country's firms, as per The Information. As of now, Alibaba, ByteDance, and the Chinese government have not officially confirmed the report.