Nvidia privately confirmed it could track chips to fight smuggling, even as industry publicly questioned feasibility
2026-11-13 · MIT Technology Review
Private assurance, public doubt
In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Illinois Representative Bill Foster said Nvidia representatives told him it would be technically possible to implement anti-smuggling measures required by the Chip Security Act. Foster, a Democrat on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, is a cosponsor of the bill, which would add geotracking requirements to verify the location of advanced AI chips and prevent smuggling to China. According to Foster, during technical discussions the representatives said, “yeah, of course we can do this,” but “they never put anything in writing.” The article says this private acknowledgment goes further than anything Nvidia has made public. Nvidia did not respond to requests for comment or confirmation.
Industry group opposed
When the bill was introduced in May 2025, lawmakers said the technology to implement it existed, something Nvidia had not publicly confirmed. In March 2026, the Semiconductor Industry Association, of which Nvidia is a member, explicitly opposed the bill and wrote that its chip-tracking mandates were “new, untested, and potentially infeasible.” The article presents this as a contrast between Nvidia’s private comments and the industry’s public position. It also notes that the Chip Security Act is one of three chip-security bills under consideration for inclusion in the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act; all three drew renewed attention after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s resignation and reported affair with an alleged Chinese spy.
Fleet Intelligence and location data
Other technology Nvidia has built for customers suggests it can offer accurate tracking of chip locations. In December 2025, it announced Fleet Intelligence, a tool that lets customers monitor how advanced chips perform across data-center locations. Nvidia confirmed to Reuters that the tool could indicate which country chips were in, but would not elaborate on whether it could be used to prevent smuggling. In early October, as lawmakers were reportedly increasingly concerned about Nvidia’s role in smuggling, MIT Technology Review asked whether Fleet Intelligence could be used to prevent the practice. Nvidia declined to answer directly and sent a statement saying governments and media had found “insignificant diversion of controlled US products—a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of domestic compute China already has.”
Smuggling fallout
The article says the recent fallout at Nvidia involves several 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 under investigation for smuggling advanced GPUs to China. A US Commerce Department inquiry into Megaspeed was reportedly halted after intervention by Nvidia. Megaspeed reportedly bought chips from Supermicro, which packages Nvidia chips onto servers.
Bill mechanisms and next steps
As drafted, the Chip Security Act would require a mechanism to track chip locations through facility inspections, company attestations, or ping-based location mechanisms. The ping-based technique, described as the hardest to circumvent, would require a GPU to send a location signal 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 were not voluntarily adopting such tools if they could technically do so. If the bill’s requirements pass as part of the Senate NDAA, the tracking mechanisms would only tell investigators where chips are, not offer a way to disconnect them if they are found to have been smuggled. Foster told MIT Technology Review he intends to introduce stricter legislation in the new year requiring licenses to operate advanced GPUs; before a GPU could connect, its valid license would need to be verified. Foster said the controversy has fueled support among colleagues for the bill’s rules: “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.”