Chip geopolitics
China may allow ByteDance and Alibaba to buy Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 chips
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology signaled it may let Alibaba and ByteDance purchase Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 Blackwell workstation GPU (84 GB GDDR7, 21,760 CUDA cores, >$6,000). ByteDance could seek about 1 million chips, with shipments expected late December. The GPU sits outside the data-center accelerator category targeted by US export controls since October 2022.
