CHINA WEIGHS EASING RESTRICTIONS ON NEW NVDA CHIP PURCHASES Beijing has signaled it may allow Alibaba, ByteDance and others to buy Nvidia’s new RTX Pro 5500, per The Information. ByteDance alone is weighing an order for about 1M chips. Key details: • Nvidia plans to begin shipments in late December • Targeting ~500K chips per quarter for China • ByteDance’s potential order alone could take 2 quarters to fill • Buyers plan to put 8 chips per server to run AI models • Price: ~85K-90K yuan, roughly $13K each • Similar pricing to Huawei’s Ascend 950PR The RTX Pro 5500 is not one of Nvidia’s top data-center AI chips and lacks the high-speed interconnects and premium memory used in those systems. The bigger story is China’s compute shortage. AI companies are rolling out products faster than domestic chip supply can keep up, with Huawei itself recently saying it cannot meet demand. Approval timing, quantities and conditions are still unclear. 27-SEP-2026 02:09 PM ET