Nvidia privately told Rep. Foster it can track its chips, despite industry pushback

Nvidia's representatives told Rep. Bill Foster that the tracking requirements in his Chip Security Act are technically possible, a private admission that goes further than anything the company has said on the record. During technical discussions, Foster told MIT Technology Review, the reaction was, quote: yeah, of course we can do this. Nothing was ever put in writing.

The bill, introduced in May 2025, would add geotracking requirements to verify where advanced AI chips are, aimed at stopping smuggling to China. It is one of three chip-security bills under consideration for the Senate's National Defense Authorization Act. The Semiconductor Industry Association, which counts Nvidia as a member, opposed the bill in March 2026, calling its tracking mandates new, untested, and potentially infeasible.

Nvidia's own products point the other way. Fleet Intelligence, announced in December 2025, lets customers monitor how its advanced chips perform across data center locations — and can indicate which country a chip sits in, Nvidia confirmed to Reuters, though it would not say whether the tool could fight smuggling. Asked directly about that in early October, the company declined to answer, sending a statement that governments and media have found insignificant diversion of controlled US products, a drop in the bucket next to China's domestic compute.

The scrutiny lands amid fallout at Nvidia: CEO Jensen Huang's resignation and a reported affair with Alice Huang, who runs Megaspeed, a Singaporean firm now under investigation for smuggling advanced GPUs to China. A US Commerce Department inquiry into Megaspeed was reportedly halted after intervention by Nvidia, and the firm reportedly bought chips from Supermicro, which packages Nvidia's chips onto servers.

As drafted, the act would allow inspections of facilities, attestations by companies, or ping-based location mechanisms — the hardest to dodge, since a GPU would signal its location when it comes online. In September, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology found the ping approach the most cost-effective option. Even if the rules pass, they would only show investigators where chips are, not let them disconnect smuggled ones.

Foster intends to introduce stricter legislation in the new year: licenses to operate advanced GPUs, with each valid license verified before a chip can connect. He said he did not ask Nvidia's representatives why they weren't adopting tracking tools voluntarily. The controversy, he added, has fueled support among his colleagues — there will be a lot of political pressure, in the wake of everything that's happened, on companies to do a very good job of geographically validating where a chip actually is.