The United States is planning to pass a law that would allow verification of the location of artificial intelligence chips, including those made by NVIDIA, after they are sold. This is to combat smuggling of chips to China, Reuters reports.
NVIDIA chips are important for training large language models used in chatbots, image generators and other systems. Donald Trump and Joe Biden have restricted exports of these chips to China.
Despite this, NVIDIA chips still end up in China. The company says it cannot track them after they are sold. However, US representative Bill Foster believes that such technology is available and some of it is already built into the chips.
Foster, a former particle physicist who used to design computer chips himself, is now planning to introduce legislation that would require regulators to develop rules to track chips and block them from operating without the proper license.
In a comment to Reuters, Foster also noted that there are already reports of large-scale chip smuggling that have not been publicly announced.
"This is not an imaginary future problem. It is a problem now, and at some point we're going to discover that the Chinese Communist Party, or their military, is busy designing weapons using large arrays of chips, or even just working on (artificial general intelligence), which is as immediate as nuclear technology," says Foster.
SemiAnalysis analysts say chip smuggling has become more relevant after the emergence of large language models from China's DeepSeek, which seriously compete with American ones. These models run on NVIDIA chips, which are banned from sale in China. In Singapore, three Chinese citizens were charged with fraud related to servers that may have contained these chips.
Chip-tracking technology already exists, though it's not yet widely used. Sources say Google is already using it in its data centers for security. Foster's bill would give the U.S. Commerce Department six months to create rules that would make the technology mandatory.