China might give the green light for Alibaba and ByteDance to purchase Nvidia’s new RTX Pro 5500 chips. This probably won’t have a huge impact on Nvidia anyway.
Authorities have already been asking the companies how many chips they would need and for what kind of use. The chip is not part of the data center accelerators that U.S. export controls have specifically targeted, and furthermore, actual permission has not been granted yet.
The timing follows last week’s Xi-Trump summit in Washington, at which chip export controls were conspicuously absent from both governments’ official readouts. USTR Jamieson Greer told CNBC that export controls deemed national security issues were “taken off the table” during trade talks, and China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not mention export controls in its announcement of eight summit deliverables, according to the South China Morning Post.