China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is considering whether to permit ByteDance and Alibaba to buy Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 chips, though neither Beijing nor the companies has confirmed approvals, orders or deliveries. The ministry asked the companies how many cards they seek and how they would use them, The Information reported, as Chinese AI developers face a shortage of computing capacity for chatbots and software agents. Nvidia markets the workstation-class card for AI agents, inference and simulation; it has 84 GB of memory and can draw up to 600 watts. Nvidia says its $108 billion current-quarter forecast excludes China data-center chip revenue, meaning any RTX Pro 5500 sales would be additional to that outlook. The report did not specify potential volumes, timing or whether larger Nvidia data-center chips could receive similar treatment. China previously restricted purchases of Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000D, while domestic suppliers Huawei and Cambricon hold nearly 80% of the country’s AI server market, according to analysts cited by the Korea Times.