China may open a narrow new path for Nvidia chip sales

China has reportedly signaled that companies including Alibaba and ByteDance could buy Nvidia’s newly released RTX Pro 5500, a powerful graphics chip designed for professional computing. According to The Information, China’s industry ministry asked prospective buyers how many chips they wanted and how they planned to use them, then told some firms it intended to approve purchases. That matters because Nvidia’s China business has been squeezed from both directions: U.S. export controls limit sales of advanced chips, while Beijing has also placed curbs on imports of U.S. technology. The RTX Pro 5500 is not Nvidia’s flagship data-center AI processor, but it could still be deployed in servers to run AI services—making any approval a potentially useful, though still unconfirmed, channel into a major market.