China considers allowing Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 sales

Beijing is considering allowing domestic firms to purchase advanced chips from Nvidia, according to a report by The Information on Monday, September 28, 2026. The move sent shares of Chinese semiconductor companies tumbling.

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology asked local technology companies, including Alibaba and ByteDance, to report how many Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 units they planned to buy and how they intended to use them. The inquiry signaled an intention to eventually approve the sales.

The RTX Pro 5500 is a Blackwell-generation professional workstation GPU that Nvidia launched earlier in September. The chip can handle heavy artificial intelligence computing workloads, but it sits outside the category of AI accelerator chips that the United States has largely restricted from export to China.

Potential approval of Nvidia sales would bring stronger competition for domestic manufacturers. On Monday, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp fell 3.7%, Hua Hong Semiconductor dropped nearly 5%, Moore Threads Technology slid 6.3%, Cambricon Technologies lost 5.7%, NAURA Technology declined 3.4%, and CXMT Corp slipped nearly 4%.

The development followed a bilateral summit in Washington, where the United States and China agreed on improved trade ties and a $30 billion mutual tariff exemption. The two nations did not discuss AI chip sales during those talks.