ByteDance Reportedly Plans to Buy 1 Million New NVIDIA Chips, May Be Approved

动察 Beating AI News Flash: The Information, citing two people familiar with the matter, reported that officials are considering allowing companies such as ByteDance and Alibaba to purchase Nvidia RTX PRO 5500. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently required these companies to report their planned purchase quantities and uses, and indicated to some companies that it intends to approve them. However, when approval will be granted and how many units will be allowed to be purchased are currently uncertain.

Among them, ByteDance is considering purchasing about 1 million RTX PRO 5500 units, with the final quantity depending on the approval outcome and Nvidia's supply capacity. This card is not a data center AI chip like the H200, but rather Nvidia's newly listed Blackwell workstation GPU this month, equipped with 84GB GDDR7 memory. Nvidia officially positions it as a rack-mounted workstation and explicitly supports large model inference, Agents, and generative AI.

The report also said that some domestic Chinese buyers plan to install 8 RTX PRO 5500 units per server to run AI models. Nvidia plans to begin shipments in late December and aims to supply about 500,000 units per quarter to the domestic market. If ByteDance ultimately does purchase 1 million units, that single company alone would be equivalent to two quarters of planned supply.

Domestic Chinese companies still lack AI computing power. Huawei Rotating Chairman Xu Zhijun also said last week that its AI computing equipment production capacity cannot even meet domestic demand. However, whether the RTX PRO 5500 can smoothly enter the domestic market faces another hurdle: the U.S. government has not yet publicly confirmed whether it complies with existing export restrictions, and currently only some industry insiders expect that it can.