China’s government has signaled that it will let ByteDance, Alibaba and other companies buy Nvidia’s RTX Pro 5500, The Next Web reported Sunday, citing The Information. The report said the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology asked the firms to submit purchase plans for the card and then told some of them that approval was expected.

What Happened

According to The Information, which cited two people familiar with the matter, the ministry’s request covered ByteDance, Alibaba and other Chinese companies. The RTX Pro 5500 is a professional workstation graphics card built on Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture with 84GB of memory.

Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report, and The Next Web said it had not independently confirmed it either. Neither ByteDance nor Alibaba responded to Reuters’ requests for comment, and none of Nvidia, the two companies or the ministry had commented publicly by Sunday. No unit volumes, prices or delivery dates were reported.

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In a statement cited by Quartz, Nvidia said U.S. companies remain restricted by a combination of "outdated U.S. export controls," which it said cover gaming products released nearly five years ago, and China’s own limits on U.S. imports.

Why It Matters

The card’s category is central to the story. Some industry executives expect the RTX Pro 5500 to fall outside U.S. export restrictions because it is designed for high-end workstations rather than as a data center AI accelerator, according to Quartz’s summary of the reporting. If that reading holds, Chinese AI companies would gain access to Blackwell-generation hardware that current U.S. rules do not block.

For Beijing, an approval would be a notable signal. China has alternated between discouraging purchases of Nvidia parts to support domestic chipmakers and allowing companies to buy compliant products when local supply falls short. Collecting purchase plans first gives the ministry a view of which companies want the cards, and in what quantities, before it signs off.

Context

The report follows a series of partial openings. Earlier in 2026 the U.S. approved sales of Nvidia’s H200 chips to Chinese companies, but in August ByteDance and Tencent were told to keep their initial H200 shipments in Hong Kong rather than bring them into mainland China, The Next Web reported at the time.

Chinese AI developers have also found ways around the restrictions without importing hardware. Quartz noted that ByteDance, Alibaba, Moonshot AI and Tencent have accessed restricted Nvidia compute remotely through data centers in Thailand, Malaysia and Japan.

Nvidia’s China business has been squeezed from both sides: by U.S. export controls on its most capable parts and by Beijing’s policies favoring domestic suppliers.

What to Watch

The next steps are a formal approval from the ministry, if one comes, and any confirmation from Nvidia of orders or shipment timing. Washington’s reaction matters too: if U.S. officials decide the RTX Pro 5500 is being bought in volume for AI workloads, the card’s apparent exemption from export rules could be revisited. Order sizes, once they emerge, will show whether Chinese firms see the card as a stopgap or a serious addition to their compute fleets.