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

Representative Bill Foster, an Illinois Democrat, says Nvidia representatives privately acknowledged that the chip-location tracking his Chip Security Act would mandate is technically achievable — a position at odds with the public stance taken by the semiconductor industry group the company belongs to.

Foster, who co-sponsored the bill in 2025 and sits on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, described technical discussions with Nvidia staff in which the company did not commit anything to paper. "They never put anything in writing, but when I had technical discussions," he said, "yeah, of course we can do this." That private acknowledgment goes further than any public Nvidia statement on the question. Publicly, the picture is different: in March 2026 the Semiconductor Industry Association, of which Nvidia is a member, opposed the bill and wrote that its tracking mandates were "new, untested, and potentially infeasible."

The Chip Security Act would require a mechanism for verifying where advanced AI chips are located in order to deter smuggling to China. Its drafters allowed three approaches: facility inspections, corporate attestations, or a ping the GPU emits when it comes online. That ping-based method is the hardest to spoof, and a September analysis by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology found it would also be the most cost-effective. The bill is one of three chip-security measures being weighed for inclusion in the Senate's National Defense Authorization Act, drawing fresh attention in the wake of Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang's reported resignation and affair with an alleged Chinese spy.

Nvidia's own product roadmap appears to support the feasibility claim. In December 2025 it unveiled Fleet Intelligence, a tool letting customers track advanced chip performance across data-center sites; Nvidia confirmed to Reuters that the tool can reveal which country a chip sits in, while declining to say whether it could serve anti-smuggling purposes. Asked in early October whether Fleet Intelligence could help curb diversion, the company sidestepped, saying 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." It did not respond to requests to confirm Foster's account.

The backdrop includes active smuggling allegations. Alice Huang, linked to Jensen Huang in reporting, runs Megaspeed, a Singaporean firm under investigation for moving advanced GPUs to China; a Commerce Department inquiry into Megaspeed was reportedly halted after Nvidia intervened, and the company reportedly bought chips from Supermicro, which packages Nvidia silicon into servers.

What to watch: Foster said he never asked Nvidia why it does not voluntarily deploy such tracking if it is indeed possible. He also noted a structural gap — even if the requirements clear the NDAA, the resulting data would show investigators where chips are located, with no built-in mechanism to remotely disable units found to be smuggled.