China may clear Nvidia chips for two AI firms

China has signaled it may let two domestic companies—ByteDance and Alibaba—buy NVIDIA’s RTX PRO 5500 chips, after the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology asked firms for purchase plans, CNBC reports, citing The Information. The report describes a possible approval, not confirmed orders or deliveries, and says the chip’s professional-computing classification could keep it outside current U.S. export restrictions. For infrastructure planners, this is a potential regional hardware lane rather than a shipment guarantee: model accelerator access by jurisdiction and approval status, as the archive’s analysis of Nscale’s staged financing illustrates.