Beijing tells Alibaba and ByteDance to file Nvidia purchase plans

For a year, China's approach to Nvidia has been subtraction — stop ordering, buy domestic. Sunday's report is Beijing trying addition instead, on a chip that was never on the banned list.

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has asked Alibaba, ByteDance and other domestic companies to report their plans to buy Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500, and told them the government intends to approve the purchases. The Information's Qianer Liu reported the approach on Sunday, citing two people familiar with the matter. Reuters and Bloomberg both carried the story, with Reuters spelling out the ministry's wording — that the government "intends to approve" — and noting it could not independently verify the report. Nvidia, Alibaba and ByteDance have not commented.

The chip matters as much as the permission. The RTX Pro 5500 is a Blackwell workstation card with 84 GB of GDDR7 memory and 21,760 CUDA cores — the core count of a consumer RTX 5090, with well over twice the memory — sold as a professional graphics and simulation part rather than a data-center AI accelerator. That classification is the point. U.S. export rules keep Nvidia's top data-center parts out of China; they say much less about a workstation board that ships by the pallet. At 84 GB, one card holds models that would otherwise need a restricted server, and a rack of them is inference capacity that arrives through the front door.

The timing reverses a posture Beijing spent the summer building. From August, regulators were reported to have told domestic firms to stop placing new Nvidia orders and to steer toward domestic alternatives; the exception was a small number of import licences for H200s to ByteDance and Tencent — Beijing lets ByteDance and Tencent import Nvidia H200 chips. Approving RTX Pro 5500s points the same way: Chinese labs need compute now, domestic supply cannot yet close the gap, and the state would rather see the orders than lose sight of them.

Read the verb carefully, though. The instruction is to report plans, not to proceed. Beijing is not lifting a restriction; it is putting itself in the middle of the purchase so it can decide case by case. That is the instrument it has used on rare earths and on the H200 licences — control exercised through the queue rather than the statute book — and it gives the ministry something a ban never did: visibility into which lab is scaling what, and a lever over who is served first. The reported word "intends" is doing deliberate work, and it is not a promise.

What the report does not say: how many chips, at what price, on what timeline, or whether approval reaches companies beyond the ones named. This is a single-outlet scoop resting on two unnamed sources. The scale is unknown, and the arrangement can still narrow.

What to watch: whether a volume figure or official confirmation follows in the next few days, and whether Washington reads an 84 GB workstation card as a loophole in the export regime rather than a product category of its own.

If a workstation GPU can substitute for a data-center accelerator, is export control still controlling anything? Tell us in the comments.

Sources: The Information — China Weighs Allowing Purchases of New Nvidia Chips by ByteDance, Alibaba · Reuters — China weighs allowing ByteDance, Alibaba to buy new Nvidia chips, The Information reports · Bloomberg — China May Let Alibaba Buy New Nvidia Chips, The Information Says · Techmeme · wccftech — NVIDIA Intros RTX PRO 5500 Blackwell Graphics Card, 21,760 Cores, 84 GB Memory