China weighs allowing ByteDance and Alibaba to buy Nvidia chips

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has asked Alibaba and ByteDance to explain how they would use Nvidia’s RTX Pro 5500 chips, The Information reported. The chips are designed for gaming, but Chinese firms may put them into servers to support AI models.

China has not made a final decision. Sources told The Information that the government intends to allow at least some imports. ByteDance plans to order 1 million chips if it gets approval, and Nvidia is reportedly preparing to ship initial orders in December.

Nvidia says the chips are outdated and cannot be used to train AI. But the possible sales could give the company a foothold in China’s AI market after US export controls sharply restricted its sales there.

Huang’s access to Trump draws scrutiny

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has become a regular adviser to Trump on technology, according to Stephen Witt, author of a book about Nvidia. Witt told NPR that Trump’s recent comments downplaying AI risks echo Huang’s views. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the president is “completely aligned” with Huang.

Critics worry that Nvidia’s commercial interests could shape US policy. The company would benefit from selling more chips to China, while AI developers such as Anthropic and OpenAI have urged the White House to take risks more seriously. Huang, by contrast, has argued that AI-model distillation—using one model’s outputs to train another—is competition, not theft.

The recent Trump-Xi summit produced no reported discussion of export controls or concrete agreement on AI safety. Ro Khanna, the top Democrat on the House China committee, said Trump could have used the meeting to propose technical working groups to monitor AI risks.

The chip supply question

Some policy experts fear that easing restrictions could eventually divert chips from US data centers. Nvidia’s recent figures, however, suggest the two markets are not competing for the same supply right now: the company reportedly took a $400 million hit in the first half of 2026 from unsold H200 chips, which US companies can replace with newer models.

Whether Chinese demand for chips made for its market grows, and whether it affects US supply, remains uncertain. For now, China’s decision on the RTX Pro 5500 imports is still pending.