// MIT TECH REVIEW — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Nvidia privately confirmed it could track chips to fight smuggling, even as industry publicly questioned feasibility
The Chip Security Act is getting renewed attention following Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s resignation and reported affair with an alleged Chinese spy.
Representatives from Nvidia told Illinois representative Bill Foster that it would be technically possible to implement the anti-smuggling measures called for in the Chip Security Act, Foster told MIT Technology Review in an interview on Thursday, even while an industry group claimed they were “potentially infeasible.”
Foster, a Democrat who serves on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, is a cosponsor of the act, which would introduce geotracking requirements to verify the location of advanced AI chips in order to prevent their smuggling to China. It is one of three chip-security bills under consideration for inclusion in the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act, each of which is drawing renewed attention after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s resignation and reported affair with an alleged Chinese spy.
When the Chip Security Act was introduced, in May 2025, lawmakers said the technology to implement it existed, something Nvidia has not publicly confirmed. In March 2026, the Semiconductor Industry Association, of which Nvidia is a member, explicitly opposed the bill and wrote that its mandates for chip tracking were “new, untested, and potentially infeasible.”
But privately, Nvidia representatives working with Foster told the lawmaker that the company could implement them.
“They never put anything in writing,” Foster says, but during technical discussions on the possibility of such safeguards, their reaction was “yeah, of course we can do this.” This private acknowledgment to Foster goes further than anything Nvidia has previously made public.
Other technology Nvidia has built for its customers suggests that the company can indeed offer accurate tracking of its chips’ locations. In December 2025, for example, it announced a new tool called Fleet Intelligence that would allow customers to monitor how its advanced chips were performing across different data center locations. In doing so, the tool could indicate which country chips were in, Nvidia confirmed to Reuters, but the company would not elaborate on whether this technology could be used to prevent smuggling.
Nvidia did not respond to requests for comment or confirmation of Foster’s characterization.
In early October, when lawmakers were reportedly increasingly concerned about Nvidia’s role in smuggling, MIT Technology Review asked the company if Fleet Intelligence could be used to prevent the practice. It declined to answer directly, instead sending a statement: “Governments and media have found insignificant diversion of controlled US products—a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of domestic compute China already has.”
The recent fallout at Nvidia involves a number of people and companies alleged to be involved in chip smuggling. Alice Huang, with whom Jensen Huang reportedly had an affair, 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 invention by Nvidia. Megaspeed reportedly bought chips from Supermicro, a company that packages Nvidia’s chips onto servers.