Beijing has reportedly signaled it may approve domestic purchases of Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 workstation GPU, a product some industry executives believe falls outside current US export restrictions. The Information reported that China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology contacted ByteDance, Alibaba and other companies to ask how many RTX Pro 5500 chips they wanted and for what uses. Some sources said officials indicated approvals were coming, although no public confirmation had been made by Sept. 27.
An Nvidia spokesperson said: "US firms continue to be restricted by a combination of outdated US export controls, which cover gaming products released nearly a half a decade ago, and China's own limits on US imports."
ByteDance was reportedly considering an order of about 1 million RTX Pro 5500 cards, while Alibaba was also among companies approached about potential purchases. Nvidia lists the RTX Pro 5500 as a Blackwell workstation card with 84GB of GDDR7 memory, targeting AI inference, simulation and professional graphics workloads. It supports rack-mounted workstation deployments and up to 600 watts of power.
The possible reopening matters because Nvidia's China data-center business has been squeezed by both US export controls and Beijing's own restrictions. A year earlier, China's Cyberspace Administration told major tech companies to stop testing and cancel orders for Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D, according to Cryptopolitan. More recently, Washington granted seven Chinese firms, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com, licenses to buy up to 75,000 H200 chips each, but as of May none had been delivered. Nvidia said H200 shipments contributed less than 1% of second-quarter Data Center revenue, and the company recorded a $400 million charge tied to H200 inventory and purchase obligations.
NVDA stock closed at $225.07 on Sept. 25, up 0.22% for the session and 20.68% year to date. Nvidia reported second-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106% year over year, with Data Center revenue of $89 billion, up 117%. The company forecast third-quarter revenue of $108 billion, plus or minus 2%, but excluded China Data Center compute revenue from that outlook. TrendForce projected global data-center power demand capacity at 490.7 gigawatts by 2030, with grid-deliverable capacity at only 222.6 gigawatts, implying a roughly 268-gigawatt gap; AI servers could drive 53.7% of data-center power demand by 2030. Formal Chinese approval or Nvidia disclosure on RTX Pro 5500 shipments remains the next verifiable catalyst.
