ByteDance may seek approval to purchase 1 million NVIDIA RTX PRO 5500 GPUs

ME AI reports, according to two sources cited by The Information, Chinese authorities are considering permitting companies such as ByteDance and Alibaba to purchase NVIDIA RTX PRO 5500 GPUs. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has recently requested these companies to report their planned purchase quantities and intended uses, and has signaled to some firms that approval is likely. However, the timing of approval and the exact quantities permitted remain undecided. ByteDance is reportedly considering purchasing approximately one million RTX PRO 5500 GPUs, with the final number contingent on approval outcomes and NVIDIA’s supply capacity. This GPU is not a data center AI chip like the H200, but rather NVIDIA’s newly launched Blackwell workstation GPU, featuring 84GB of GDDR7 memory. NVIDIA officially positions it as a rack-mounted workstation GPU, explicitly supporting large model inference, agents, and generative AI. The report also indicates that some domestic buyers plan to install eight RTX PRO 5500 GPUs per server to run AI models. NVIDIA plans to begin shipping in late December and aims to supply around 500,000 units per quarter to China. If ByteDance ultimately purchases one million units, just this single company would account for two quarters’ worth of planned supply. Chinese enterprises still face significant shortages in AI computing power. Last week, Xu Zhijun, Acting Chairman of Huawei, stated that domestic production capacity for AI computing equipment is insufficient to meet local demand. However, another hurdle remains for the RTX PRO 5500’s entry into China: the U.S. government has not yet publicly confirmed whether the GPU complies with existing export restrictions; only some industry insiders anticipate it will be approved. (Source: BlockBeats)