Nvidia Blackwell is likely to come to China in the form of RTX Pro 5500 graphics card adapter

Every meeting between the leaders of China and the United States in the past few years has been accompanied by a wave of rumors that the United States may relax export restrictions, and the last time was no exception. Information version reportChinese companies will have the opportunity to buy the professional Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 graphics adapter based on the Blackwell architecture that was launched a few weeks ago.

Image source: NVIDIA

It’s worth noting that we’re talking about licensing from Chinese authorities, as the supply of foreign components that can be used to train AI models is regulated not only by U.S. export laws but also by Chinese import rules. As noted by sources, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People’s Republic of China recently asked some Chinese companies to outline their near-term plans to purchase the Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 graphics solution launched this month. Regulators want to get justification from Chinese companies about how to use this U.S. innovation. Some representatives of China’s artificial intelligence industry, including Alibaba and ByteDance, have been told that Chinese authorities are ready to approve such acquisitions.

Formally speaking, the RTX Pro 5500 is intended for workstations rather than the most efficient computing, but it’s equipped with a Blackwell chip with 21,760 CUDA cores and 84 GB of GDDR7 memory, supporting ECC and a 416-bit bus. Considering that Chinese companies also often use GeForce RTX gaming graphics cards to accelerate computing in the AI ​​field, they will definitely need a “middle choice” in the form of RTX Pro 5500.

As Saxo analysts who spoke to Bloomberg noted, this relaxation by Chinese authorities could serve as an example of healthy pragmatism. The use of U.S. computing accelerators by Chinese developers could accelerate the development of the country’s artificial intelligence industry, because domestic suppliers cannot yet meet the demand for computing resources. The question now is how U.S. authorities will respond to interest from Chinese buyers, given their previous refusal to lift restrictions on Chinese supply of Blackwell-generation chips at this stage of their own computing infrastructure development.