China is considering allowing Alibaba to purchase Nvidia's RTX-series consumer graphics chips as Beijing and Chinese AI developers scramble to work around a persistent shortage of AI accelerators, The Information reports.

The reported plan centers on a simple substitution. US export controls restrict Nvidia's data-center AI chips — the A100, H100 and their China-specific derivatives — but consumer GeForce RTX GPUs face looser restrictions. Several Chinese AI companies have already adopted consumer cards for AI training and inference, a workaround that trades performance and interconnect bandwidth for availability. An official green light for Alibaba, China's largest cloud provider, would formalize that practice at scale.

The context is a supply squeeze with few exits. Washington's successive rounds of export controls, tightened through 2023, have cut Chinese firms off from Nvidia's flagship accelerators, while domestic alternatives remain limited. Huawei's Ascend 910B is the most credible local substitute, but its output is constrained by sanctions on the chip's production at SMIC and by tight advanced-packaging capacity. That gap between AI compute demand and legal supply is what reportedly pushed Beijing toward tolerating consumer GPUs.

For Nvidia, the stakes are commercial as much as geopolitical. China accounted for roughly a fifth of the company's data-center revenue before the export controls took effect, and CEO Jensen Huang has repeatedly warned that US restrictions hand the Chinese market to domestic rivals. RTX sales into China would recover only a sliver of that revenue — consumer GPUs carry far lower price tags than H100-class parts — but they would keep Nvidia's channel and customer relationships alive in a market Huang clearly does not want to cede.

Alibaba's position adds weight to any approval. The company runs one of China's largest AI cloud operations and builds its own large language models, including the Qwen family, which demands vast training compute. Securing even consumer-grade Nvidia silicon in volume would ease a bottleneck that has slowed its model roadmap and cloud expansion.

The report does not specify which RTX models Alibaba would buy, in what volumes, or at what price, and Beijing has not publicly confirmed any approval. Past precedent suggests caution: Chinese regulators have previously discouraged domestic firms from buying Nvidia's compliant China-market chips, such as the H20, signaling that official tolerance for Nvidia purchases can shift with the political winds.

Washington could close the workaround too. US officials have already debated tightening rules on consumer GPUs shipped in large quantities to China, and a mass Alibaba purchase would give hawks a concrete target. Any approval from Beijing, therefore, carries a shelf life.

For now, the strongest signal is that China's AI sector values access to Nvidia silicon enough to accept consumer-grade parts — and that Beijing may be willing to bend its own resistance to US chips to keep its AI buildout on schedule. Whether that opening survives the next round of export rules will determine how much of the demand Huawei, and not Nvidia, ultimately captures.