China's government is reported to be moving toward allowing domestic sales of Nvidia's new workstation chip, the RTX Pro 5500.

Cryptopolitan, a blockchain media outlet, reported on Sept. 27 that some in the Chinese industry are projecting the product may not be included in U.S. export restrictions on China.

Two people familiar with the matter said some industry executives see the RTX Pro 5500 as outside the scope of U.S. export limits. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology gauged purchase demand from companies including ByteDance and Alibaba, and some companies were told the government plans to approve it. The information was not independently verified.

The RTX Pro 5500 is a Blackwell-based workstation card unveiled by Nvidia. Its product page describes it as having 84GB of GDDR7 memory and being designed for rack-mounted configurations. Buyers can currently only register to be notified at launch.

Nvidia has publicly criticised U.S. export controls. An Nvidia spokesperson said U.S. companies have faced continued constraints as outdated export controls based on gaming products released almost 5 years ago overlap with China's restrictions on imports from the United States. That is why attention is focused on whether new products classified as workstation chips, such as the RTX Pro 5500, can pass through such regulatory loopholes.

China has not taken the same stance on Nvidia products. The Cyberspace Administration of China in September 2025 ordered major technology companies to stop testing Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D and to cancel orders. That amounts to a different signal from a year earlier.

It has also been confirmed that an approval signal does not necessarily lead to actual imports. The Nvidia H200 case is a representative example. In January 2026, China asked Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance to prepare H200 orders and to submit purchase plans that included some China-made chips. The United States later granted licences to seven Chinese companies including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com to buy up to 75,000 H200 chips each.

But as of May, not a single H200 had been delivered. It shows that actual supply is possible only when confirmation of demand in China, government approval and U.S. export licences all align.

In this situation, the RTX Pro 5500 is being watched to see whether it can become a new channel for China's AI and cloud companies to secure Nvidia chips. A significant gap still remains between government approval signals and actual shipments, with future U.S. interpretations and licensing procedures, and China-side import restrictions, expected to act as variables.