China may let its largest AI companies buy Nvidia inference chips without reopening the data-centre market

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has asked companies including Alibaba and ByteDance how many of Nvidia’s new RTX Pro 5500 chips they want and what they would use them for. Officials have told some prospective buyers that purchases are likely to be approved, according to The Information. The critical limits remain unsettled: there is no announced decision, timetable, quota or eligibility rule.

The product is sold as a high-end professional-computing card rather than a conventional data-centre accelerator. That boundary is porous in practice. One buyer plans servers containing eight cards, allowing larger models to be run across them. Nvidia is preparing to ship from late December and is reportedly targeting roughly 500,000 units a quarter for China. Buyers quoted prices of 85,000–90,000 yuan—about $13,000—close to Huawei’s Ascend 950PR.

This is a market governed by two vetoes. Washington decides which chips may legally reach China; Beijing decides whether large domestic firms may buy them. Nvidia’s latest quarterly filing says US licences permitted small H200 shipments, but Chinese restrictions prevented it from selling all the authorised inventory. Those shipments represented less than 1% of its most recent data-centre revenue. Nvidia describes itself as effectively excluded from China’s data-centre compute market even while uncontrolled gaming and workstation products remain available.

Selective approval would therefore not amount to a general reopening. China could permit a workstation-class product that relieves demand for inference—the repeated running of completed models—while continuing to push strategically important training workloads and developer investment towards Huawei. Nvidia would preserve a foothold in Chinese software ecosystems; Alibaba and ByteDance would receive scarce capacity; and Beijing could keep both the quantity and the permitted uses under administrative control.

The unresolved question is whether this is a temporary bridge or a durable tier in China’s chip policy. At current reported prices, domestic and Nvidia options are already competing on more than cost: availability, software compatibility and official permission matter as much as benchmark performance. Until approvals and allocations are public, purchase plans should not be mistaken for shipments.