Nvidia privately confirmed it could track chips to fight smuggling, even as industry publicly questioned feasibility

Representatives from Nvidia told Illinois representative Bill Foster that the tracking requirements of his Chip Security Act meant to combat smuggling were technically possible, Foster told MIT Technology Review in an interview on Thursday, even while its industry group claimed they were “potentially infeasible.” 

Representative Foster, a Democrat who serves on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, co-sponsored the Chip Security Act, which would introduce geotracking requirements to verify locations of advanced AI chips to prevent their smuggling to China, in 2025. It is one of three chip-security bills under consideration for inclusion in the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act, each drawing renewed attention after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s resignation and reported affair with an alleged Chinese spy.

When the Chip Security Act was introduced in May 2025, lawmakers said the technology to implement it exists, 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, representatives from Nvidia working with Foster on the technical possibility of such safeguards told the lawmaker that the company could implement them. 

“They never put anything in writing, but when I had technical discussions,” Foster said, the reaction was, “yeah, of course we can do this.” This private acknowledgement to Foster goes farther than anything Nvidia has previously stated. 

Other technology built by Nvidia for its customers suggests that the company can indeed offer accurate tracking of its chips’ locations. In December 2025, Nvidia announced a new tool called Fleet Intelligence that would allow its 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.

MIT Technology Review asked Nvidia in early October if its Fleet Intelligence tool could be used to prevent smuggling, which lawmakers were reportedly increasingly concerned about Nvidia’s role in. The company declined to answer directly, instead sending a statement: “Governments and media have found insignificant diversion of controlled U.S. 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 invention 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.”