After Trump-Xi Summit, Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 Gains Export Prospects

An Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters on Sunday that US firms remain restricted by a combination of outdated US export controls, which cover gaming products released nearly half a decade ago, and China's own limits on US imports.

If the purchases go ahead, Nvidia would have the opportunity to maintain its Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) software ecosystem in China, where local chipmakers have been trying to lure AI developers onto their own platforms, some Chinese commentators said.

“The RTX PRO 5500 retains the full CUDA software stack. For Chinese developers, this means existing training frameworks, inference engines and toolchains can be moved across almost seamlessly without adapting the underlying software,” says a columnist with Communications World Web net), a telecommunications media platform managed by the MIIT.

“For Nvidia, every chip that enters the Chinese market helps extend the life of the CUDA ecosystem. The RTX PRO 5500 falls just below the export control red line while remaining powerful enough for real applications,” he says.“Whether it is approved offers a perfect case study of how the chip rivalry between China and the US is layered.”

“Officials asked potential buyers directly how many chips they wanted and what they would use them for. This is not a regulator scrutinizing illegal purchases but groundwork for a conditional approval. Such fine-tuned control avoids a hard landing in computing power supply while keeping a firm grip on key technologies and applications,” he writes.

He says that if ByteDance's order of about one million chips arrived in bulk, it would quickly fill China's computing power gap but could also delay some companies' plans to switch to domestic chips. He adds that regulators must strike a balance so that foreign computing power serves as a transitional supplement rather than creating path dependence.

The H200, an older-generation Nvidia AI chip that trails its latest Blackwell processors, has been at the center of a year-long tug-of-war since 2025. Washington barred its export to China until last December, when Trump allowed sales to approved Chinese customers in return for a 25% cut of the proceeds.

Beijing blocked the chip at customs in January and later allowed only limited imports. By August, ByteDance and Tencent had each received about 10,000 units, far short of the 75,000 each was licensed to buy. Beijing has instead steered firms toward Huawei Technologies' Ascend chips, made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) and run on its Compute Architecture for Neural Networks (CANN) platform.

Huawei's rotating chairman Eric Xu told the media during the Huawei Connect 2026 conference in Shanghai on September 17-19 that the company's production of AI computing equipment could not yet meet domestic demand. He said Huawei would not expand into overseas markets on a large scale in the short term.

He said Huawei is focusing on supernodes and large-scale clusters, using chip interconnects to lift the computing power of whole systems rather than relying on advanced process technology and single-chip performance as Nvidia does. Huawei did not disclose its current production capacity or give a timeline for a full overseas push.

On September 14, a few days before Xu made his remarks, Nvidia quietly launched the RTX PRO 5500, which pundits have described as an irresistible product for Chinese AI companies.

Some observers said the RTX PRO 5500 shows where Washington now draws its line: Chinese firms can buy chips powerful enough to run large AI models, but Nvidia's most advanced Blackwell data center processors, used to train cutting-edge models, remain off-limits.