China is weighing letting its largest AI companies import more of Nvidia's restricted chips, potentially handing the US chipmaker its best opening in its most constrained market in over a year.
According to The Information, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has asked Alibaba and ByteDance to submit plans to buy Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500. The chips are gaming parts, but Beijing asked the firms to detail how they intend to use them, with the expectation they would be racked into servers to power in-demand AI models. ByteDance reportedly plans an order of 1 million chips; one buyer envisions eight per server.
The context is a market Nvidia has largely lost. CEO Jensen Huang has blamed US export controls for cutting Nvidia's share of China's advanced AI chip market from roughly 95 percent to zero. Trump came into office asking "What the hell is Nvidia?", initially tightened controls, and floated breaking the company up — then met Huang at Mar-a-Lago and, as he put it, "learned the facts of life." Export controls on H200 chips were lifted; China allowed some sales, though uptake was weak. Nvidia took a $400 million hit in the first half of 2026 on unsold H200s, and China accounted for under 1 percent of its data center revenue in the most recent quarter.
The bigger concern for critics is influence. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said before the Trump–Xi talks that "the president is completely aligned with Jensen Huang." Stephen Witt, author of a book on Huang, told NPR that Trump's recent claims — that AI destroying humanity is a "hoax" and that AI will be an economic boon — are "exactly Jensen's talking points," and called Huang "the president's most influential adviser on technology issues." At the summit, neither side made even a symbolic gesture toward a possible AI slowdown.
Not everyone agrees Nvidia's interest is America's. Andrew Yoon of the AI-safety nonprofit CivAI told CNBC that "Nvidia is the most aggressive in terms of, let's just make money." Nvidia told Ars that lifting curbs on "outdated" gaming chips, released nearly half a decade ago, only helps US firms unfairly burdened by rules on chips that cannot train AI.
Huang has also broken with US enforcement on distillation: the FBI has accused six Chinese firms of copying US frontier models, but Huang called distillation "not robbery" but "competition." Approval is not guaranteed; sources told The Information Beijing intends to allow at least some chips in, with first shipments possibly in December.
