Banned RTX 5090 and RTX PRO 6000 listings appear on JD before being removed

NVIDIA’s most restricted Blackwell GPUs briefly appeared for sale on JD, China’s largest retailer, even though those models are not officially allowed to be sold in the country.

The listings were spotted on a third party JD storefront and included three high end NVIDIA cards: the RTX 5090 32GB Blower, RTX PRO 6000 96GB Server, and RTX PRO 6000 96GB Desktop. The pages were later removed, and there is no sign that the GPUs are officially available in China.

That matters because these cards are based on NVIDIA’s advanced Blackwell architecture and remain subject to US export restrictions. China specific versions exist, such as the RTX 5090D V2, but the full RTX 5090 and RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell models are not supposed to be sold there.

Because the listings came from a third party storefront, there is no indication that NVIDIA was involved. The most likely explanation is unofficial import or smuggling, especially since the listings were removed quickly.

The timing is awkward. The listings appeared as US President Donald Trump, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, and other executives were in China, while reports also claimed the US had approved limited sales of NVIDIA’s older H200 AI GPUs to several Chinese companies.

That H200 approval is separate. The H200 is powerful, but it is not NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell hardware. Reports say around 10 Chinese companies, including ByteDance, JD, Tencent, and Alibaba, have been cleared to buy H200 chips. Distributors such as Lenovo and Foxconn have also reportedly received approval, with Lenovo confirming to Reuters that it was approved to sell H200s in China.

The JD listings show a different problem. Even if the US allows limited sales of older AI chips, restricted GPUs can still appear through unofficial channels. High demand, limited supply, and huge AI hardware needs create strong incentives for gray market sales.

For NVIDIA, this is a difficult situation. The company wants access to China again after export controls hurt its position there, but it also has to follow US restrictions. For China, the appearance of RTX 5090 and RTX PRO 6000 listings shows that demand for restricted Blackwell hardware remains strong.

The listings being removed quickly suggests they were not part of an official supply path. Still, their appearance on a major retail platform like JD shows how hard it is to fully control high end GPU movement once demand and resale profits are this high.

The larger picture is clear. US restrictions may shape official NVIDIA sales in China, but they have not eliminated demand for top end Blackwell GPUs. If anything, scarcity has made these cards even more attractive on unofficial channels.