Nvidia privately told lawmakers it can track its chips, even as industry called it infeasible

Nvidia's representatives have told Rep. Bill Foster that the anti-smuggling measures required by the Chip Security Act would be technically possible to implement, the Illinois Democrat said in an interview with MIT Technology Review on Thursday. Foster sits on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and is a cosponsor of the bill.

The legislation, introduced in May 2025, would add geotracking requirements to verify where advanced AI chips actually are, in an effort to stop them from being smuggled into China. It is one of three chip-security bills under consideration for inclusion in the Senate's National Defense Authorization Act, all of which have drawn fresh attention since Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned and reports emerged about his affair with a woman U.S. officials believe is a Chinese spy.

In public, the industry has been far more cautious. In March 2026 the Semiconductor Industry Association, of which Nvidia is a member, opposed the bill outright, writing that its tracking mandates were “new, untested, and potentially infeasible.” Behind closed doors the tone was different: “They never put anything in writing,” Foster said, but during technical discussions their reaction was “yeah, of course we can do this.”

Nvidia's existing products make the claim plausible. In December 2025 the company announced Fleet Intelligence, a tool that lets customers monitor how its advanced chips are performing across different data center locations — which could reveal which country a chip sits in. Nvidia confirmed that much to Reuters but declined to say whether the capability could be used to prevent smuggling, and it did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

When MIT Technology Review asked in October whether Fleet Intelligence could stop smuggling, the company declined to answer directly and instead sent a statement arguing that “governments and media have found insignificant diversion of controlled US products — a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of domestic compute China already has.”

As drafted, the bill would allow location verification through facility inspections, company attestations, or ping-based mechanisms that require a GPU to signal its location when it comes online. A September assessment by Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology found the ping approach to be the cheapest and hardest to circumvent.

Foster said he did not ask Nvidia's representatives why, if the tracking was technically feasible, the company was not adopting it voluntarily. He also plans to introduce stricter legislation in the new year that would require licenses to operate advanced GPUs, verified before a chip can connect — because the current bill would only show investigators where a chip is, not give them a way to disconnect it once smuggling is established.

He expects the controversy to strengthen support for the bill among colleagues: “There will be a lot of political pressure, in the wake of everything that's happened, on the companies to actually do a very good job of the geographic validation of where the chip actually is.”