ByteDance, Alibaba, and other Chinese companies may get the government’s okay to buy Nvidia’s new RTX PRO 5500 chips , The Information reported, citing unnamed sources.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has encouraged the U.S. administration to allow his company’s chips to be sold in China, citing the need to compete in the Asian market as well. At the same time, the Chinese government was encouraging its tech giants to explore using homegrown alternatives instead, to prevent their dependence on U.S. technology that could be subject to sudden export restrictions. On the other hand, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and other technologists, have called for chip restrictions against China. Alibaba, ByteDance, and the Chinese government are yet to formally confirm the report.
“China has limited domestic production capacity, and therefore, due to the scaling laws, cannot build more powerful models than the US without US chips.
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology asked companies to report their purchase plans for the chip and said the government is likely to grant its approval for the same, according to the report. “We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China,” he said in an open letter in July. Meanwhile, an Nvidia spokesperson referred to “outdated” US export controls restricting firms in the nation, The Information reported.
