Nvidia reportedly told lawmaker it could track chips to fight smuggling

Nvidia representatives privately told US Representative Bill Foster that the company could implement the geolocation mechanisms envisioned by the Chip Security Act, the lawmaker told MIT Technology Review. The bill, which could be included in the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act, seeks to verify the location of advanced AI chips to prevent their smuggling to China. Nvidia has not publicly confirmed Foster’s account and did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s request for comment.

The Semiconductor Industry Association, of which Nvidia is a member, opposed the bill in March 2026 and called its requirements “new, untested, and potentially infeasible.” Nvidia announced Fleet Intelligence in December 2025, a tool that lets customers monitor chip performance across data centers and could indicate which country the chips were in, the company confirmed to Reuters. The bill would require inspections, company attestations, or signals sent by chips when they come online; those mechanisms would show their location but would not allow them to be disconnected.