Nvidia privately said it could track chips to fight smuggling
Nvidia representatives told Illinois Representative Bill Foster that the company could technically implement the anti-smuggling measures in the Chip Security Act, Foster told MIT Technology Review in an interview on Thursday, November 12, 2026. Foster is a Democrat on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and a cosponsor of the act.
The Chip Security Act, introduced in May 2025, would introduce geotracking requirements to verify the location of advanced AI chips in order to prevent their smuggling to China. It is one of three chip-security bills under consideration for inclusion in the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act.
When the bill was introduced, lawmakers said the technology to implement it existed, something Nvidia has not publicly confirmed. In March 2026, the Semiconductor Industry Association, of which Nvidia is a member, explicitly opposed the bill and wrote that its mandates for chip tracking were “new, untested, and potentially infeasible.”
But privately, Nvidia representatives working with Foster told the lawmaker that the company could implement them. “They never put anything in writing,” Foster says, but during technical discussions on the possibility of such safeguards, their reaction was “yeah, of course we can do this.” This private acknowledgment to Foster goes further than anything Nvidia has previously made public.
Other technology Nvidia has built for its customers suggests that the company can indeed offer accurate tracking of its chips’ locations. In December 2025, for example, it announced a new tool called Fleet Intelligence that would allow customers to monitor how its advanced chips were performing across different data center locations. In doing so, the tool could indicate which country chips were in, Nvidia confirmed to Reuters, but the company would not elaborate on whether this technology could be used to prevent smuggling.
Nvidia did not respond to requests for comment or confirmation of Foster’s characterization.
In early October, when lawmakers were reportedly increasingly concerned about Nvidia’s role in smuggling, MIT Technology Review asked the company if Fleet Intelligence could be used to prevent the practice. It declined to answer directly, instead sending a statement: “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.”
The recent fallout at Nvidia involves a number of people and companies alleged to be involved in chip smuggling. Alice Huang, with whom Jensen Huang reportedly had an affair, runs Megaspeed, a Singaporean firm now under investigation for smuggling advanced GPUs to China. A US Commerce Department inquiry into the company was reportedly halted after intervention by Nvidia. Megaspeed reportedly bought chips from Supermicro, a company that packages Nvidia’s chips onto servers.
The Chip Security Act as drafted would require a mechanism to track the locations of chips, either by inspections of facilities, attestations by companies, or ping-based location mechanisms. The ping-based technique, the hardest option to circumvent, would require the GPU to send a signal of its location when it comes online. In September, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology found it would be the most cost-effective option.
Foster said he did not ask Nvidia’s representatives why they weren’t voluntarily adopting such chip-tracking tools if they could technically do so.
But if the requirements of the bill pass as part of the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act, the new tracking mechanisms would only tell investigators where the chips are, not offer a way to disconnect them if it’s revealed they have been smuggled. Foster told MIT Technology Review he intends to introduce new, stricter legislation in the new year that would offer a workaround. The new rule would require licenses to operate advanced GPUs, and before a GPU could connect, its valid license would need to be verified.
In the meantime, the controversy at Nvidia, Foster says, has fueled support among his colleagues for the rules in the bill: “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.”
