Rep. Foster says Nvidia privately called chip tracking doable while its trade group called it infeasible

Illinois Rep. Bill Foster, who sits on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, told MIT Technology Review that Nvidia representatives privately said the company could technically meet the anti-smuggling requirements in the Chip Security Act. Publicly, the Semiconductor Industry Association, which counts Nvidia as a member, opposed the bill in March 2026 and called its tracking mandates “new, untested, and potentially infeasible.”

Precision matters here. Foster says Nvidia never put anything in writing, and Nvidia didn’t respond to requests to confirm his account. This is one lawmaker’s description of technical conversations, not a company admission. It does line up with what Nvidia has built: its Fleet Intelligence tool, announced in December 2025, lets customers monitor chips across data centers and can indicate which country they’re in, Nvidia confirmed to Reuters.

The Chip Security Act, introduced in May 2025 when lawmakers said the technology already existed, would require location verification for advanced AI chips to curb smuggling to China. It is one of three chip security bills under consideration for the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act, and all are getting fresh attention after the Nvidia CEO’s resignation over his reported affair with an alleged Chinese spy (our coverage). It offers options: facility inspections, company attestations or a ping-based check where the GPU reports its location when it comes online. The Center for Security and Emerging Technology found pinging the most cost-effective.

If the capability exists, the industry’s public argument looks weak. Calling a requirement infeasible differs from calling it unwelcome, and Nvidia should say plainly which it means. Some form of location verification for the most advanced chips is reasonable and overdue.

Tracking only tells investigators where a chip is; it doesn’t stop it working. Foster plans stricter legislation next year requiring a verified license before an advanced GPU can connect. That is a much bigger step: a remote kill switch on critical infrastructure, which could fail, be abused or become a target. Strong safeguards should come first. Nvidia’s own push to put agent security on a separate chip shows the company understands hardware-level control (Sentry analysis).

Nvidia has said diversion is insignificant, a drop in the bucket next to China’s domestic compute. Prosecutors have nonetheless charged a CEO over an alleged $300 million smuggling ring (coverage). And Nvidia now sits at the center of an investigation into Megaspeed, the Singapore firm run by Alice Huang, which is under investigation for smuggling advanced GPUs to China and reportedly bought chips from Supermicro; a Commerce inquiry into Megaspeed was reportedly halted after Nvidia stepped in. Approved buyers with empty offices add to the doubt (coverage). More in our regulation coverage and NVIDIA coverage.