China signals it may reopen Nvidia chip sales as ByteDance eyes 1 million units

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has quietly contacted several major domestic technology companies to ask how many of Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 chips they would want to buy, signaling that Beijing may be preparing to reopen a market it has kept effectively closed to Nvidia hardware for much of 2026.

The Chip and the Companies

The RTX Pro 5500 is a Blackwell-generation workstation graphics processor carrying 84GB of GDDR7 memory, built for professional and AI inference workloads rather than the large-scale data center training that has been the focus of the most restrictive US export controls. ByteDance is reportedly considering an order of roughly 1 million units to support its AI workloads, while Alibaba is also among the companies MIIT approached about planned purchase volumes.

As of September 27, Beijing had not publicly confirmed any approvals, and officials have only told some firms that purchases could be approved without specifying timing, volume caps, or final conditions.

Why a Workstation Chip, Specifically

The choice of the RTX Pro 5500 as the test case is not incidental. Because it is classified as a workstation part rather than a data-center accelerator, it sits outside the narrower category of chips that US export curbs target most aggressively. That distinction gives both governments room to maneuver: Washington can point to the chip's classification as evidence its restrictions remain intact for the products it considers most sensitive, while Beijing can permit purchases without appearing to capitulate on its broader posture toward US semiconductor access.

What's Actually at Stake

For Nvidia, renewed access to Chinese buyers for even a mid-tier product line matters directly to revenue, especially given how much capacity Chinese firms like ByteDance have signaled they want to absorb. For Chinese AI developers, workstation-class Blackwell hardware would ease a compute bottleneck that has pushed some domestic AI labs toward slower or less capable alternatives while data-center-class Nvidia silicon remained off-limits.

The approval, if it materializes, would arrive against a backdrop of improving but still fragile US-China technology relations — this reporting surfaced in the same week that Anthropic's CEO met with President Trump at the White House to discuss AI policy and competitiveness with China. Nvidia's next scheduled earnings disclosure, on November 17, will be the first opportunity for the company to confirm whether any of this reported demand has translated into actual shipped revenue.