Representative Bill Foster of Illinois, a member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and a cosponsor of the Chip Security Act, told MIT Technology Review that Nvidia representatives privately acknowledged to him that the company could technically implement the geotracking measures the bill would require.
The Chip Security Act, introduced in May 2025, would require mechanisms to verify the physical location of advanced AI chips to prevent their smuggling to China. The proposed options include facility inspections, corporate attestations, or ping-based location mechanisms that would have a GPU signal its location when it comes online.
Publicly, however, industry opposition has been more pronounced. In March 2026 the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), of which Nvidia is a member, explicitly opposed the bill, calling its tracking mandates "new, untested, and potentially infeasible." Foster says Nvidia’s private technical response to him went further than the company’s public statements: during discussions their reaction was, according to Foster, "yeah, of course we can do this," although nothing was put in writing.
There are existing Nvidia products that suggest the company could provide accurate location information. In December 2025 Nvidia announced a tool called Fleet Intelligence that would let customers monitor how its advanced chips are performing across different data center locations. Nvidia confirmed to Reuters that Fleet Intelligence could indicate which country chips were in, but declined to say whether the technology could be used to prevent smuggling.
Nvidia did not respond to requests to confirm Foster’s characterization. In early October, as concern reportedly grew among lawmakers about Nvidia’s role in alleged smuggling, MIT Technology Review asked the company whether Fleet Intelligence could be used to prevent diversion; Nvidia responded only with a statement noting that governments and media had found "insignificant diversion of controlled US products," compared with China’s existing domestic compute capacity.
The controversy surrounding Nvidia has intersected with investigations into alleged smuggling involving multiple people and firms. Alice Huang, who is reported to have had an affair with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, runs Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company under investigation for allegedly smuggling advanced GPUs to China. Reports say a U.S. Commerce Department inquiry into Megaspeed was halted after Nvidia’s intervention. Megaspeed reportedly purchased chips from Supermicro, a company that packages Nvidia’s chips onto servers.
On the technical side, analysts have judged different tracking approaches by cost-effectiveness. The ping-based method—deemed the hardest to circumvent because the GPU emits a location signal when it connects—was identified by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) in September as the most cost-effective option.
Foster said he did not ask Nvidia directly why it was not voluntarily adopting such chip-tracking tools if it could do so. He also warned that if the Chip Security Act’s requirements pass as part of the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act, the resulting tracking mechanisms would only tell investigators where chips are located; they would not provide a way to remotely disable chips discovered to have been smuggled.
To address that gap, Foster told MIT Technology Review he plans to introduce stricter legislation in the new year that would require licenses to operate advanced GPUs; a GPU would need a validated license before it could connect to networks. Foster added that the recent fallout at Nvidia has increased political pressure among his colleagues in favor of the bill’s rules. "In the wake of everything that's happened, there will be a lot of political pressure on companies to actually do a very good job of geographic validation of where the chip actually is," he said.
Key dates and items
- May 2025: Chip Security Act introduced.
- December 2025: Nvidia announces Fleet Intelligence.
- March 2026: Semiconductor Industry Association publicly opposes the bill.
- September (year not specified in source, referenced as September): CSET finds ping-based tracking most cost-effective.
- Early October (year not specified in source): MIT Technology Review seeks comment from Nvidia amid growing concern.
