China weighs easing Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 purchase restrictions
Beijing has signaled it may allow Alibaba, ByteDance and others to buy Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500, according to The Information. ByteDance alone is weighing an order for about 1 million chips, with shipments slated to begin in late December.
Beijing has signaled it may allow Alibaba, ByteDance and others to buy Nvidia's new RTX Pro 5500, according to The Information. ByteDance alone is weighing an order for about 1M chips. Nvidia plans to begin shipments in late December and is targeting about 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. The RTX Pro 5500 is priced at about 85K-90K yuan, or roughly $13K each, with 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 broader issue is China's compute shortage, with AI companies rolling out products faster than domestic chip supply can keep up.
Huawei recently said it cannot meet demand. Approval timing, quantities and conditions remain unclear.