Nvidia privately told lawmakers chip tracking is feasible, contradicting industry claims

What Nvidia said behind closed doors

Nvidia representatives privately told US Representative Bill Foster that the company could technically implement the anti-smuggling measures required by the Chip Security Act, according to MIT Technology Review. Foster, an Illinois Democrat who sits on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and cosponsors the bill, said the acknowledgment came during technical discussions about the proposed safeguards — but never on paper.

"They never put anything in writing," Foster told MIT Technology Review, though he said the company's private reaction amounted to "yeah, of course we can do this."

The Chip Security Act would introduce geotracking requirements to verify the physical location of advanced AI chips, with the aim of preventing them from being smuggled into China. It is one of three chip-security bills under consideration for inclusion in the Senate's National Defense Authorization Act.

A very different public message

When the bill was introduced in May 2025, lawmakers asserted that the technology needed to implement it already existed — a claim Nvidia never confirmed publicly. In March 2026, the Semiconductor Industry Association, of which Nvidia is a member, formally opposed the legislation, writing that its tracking mandates were "new, untested, and potentially infeasible."

The private assurances described by Foster go further than anything Nvidia has said on the record. The company did not respond to MIT Technology Review's requests for comment or to confirm Foster's characterization.

Fleet Intelligence hints at the capability

Nvidia's own product line suggests it can already track where its chips are. In December 2025 the company announced Fleet Intelligence, a tool that lets customers monitor how its advanced chips perform across different data center locations. Nvidia confirmed to Reuters that the tool could indicate which country a chip was in, but declined to elaborate on whether the technology could be used to prevent smuggling.

When MIT Technology Review asked Nvidia in early October whether Fleet Intelligence could be used to stop the practice, the company declined to answer directly and instead pointed to what it described as "insignificant diversion of controlled US products — a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of domestic compute China already has."

A scandal in the background

The chip-security bills are drawing renewed scrutiny following Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's resignation and a reported affair with an alleged Chinese spy. MIT Technology Review reports that the woman at the center of that story, Alice Huang, runs Megaspeed, a Singaporean firm now under investigation for smuggling advanced GPUs to China. A US Commerce Department inquiry into the company was reportedly halted after Nvidia intervened, and Megaspeed reportedly bought its chips from Supermicro, which packages Nvidia's chips into servers.

What the law would require — and what it wouldn't

As drafted, the Chip Security Act would require a mechanism to track chip locations through facility inspections, company attestations, or ping-based signals sent when a GPU comes online. The ping-based approach is the hardest to circumvent, and in September the Center for Security and Emerging Technology concluded it was also the most cost-effective option.

Foster said he did not ask Nvidia's representatives why the company was not voluntarily adopting such tracking tools if they were technically achievable.

Even if the bill passes, its mechanisms would only tell investigators where smuggled chips are — they would offer no way to disconnect them. Foster told MIT Technology Review he intends to introduce stricter legislation in the new year that would require licenses to operate advanced GPUs, with a valid license verified before a chip could connect.

He also predicted the fallout at Nvidia would push his colleagues toward action: "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."

Why it matters

If chip tracking is as feasible as Foster says Nvidia privately admitted, the industry's central argument against the Chip Security Act — that the mandates cannot realistically be implemented — weakens sharply. The episode also highlights the gap between what chipmakers tell lawmakers in private and what their trade associations say in public, at a moment when Nvidia is already under scrutiny over alleged smuggling networks. Perhaps most significantly, Foster's planned licensing bill points beyond monitoring: GPUs that cannot connect without a verified license would give governments not just visibility into smuggled hardware, but an effective off switch.