When the Chip Security Act was introduced in May 2025, lawmakers said the technology to implement it exists, 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, representatives from Nvidia working with Foster on the technical possibility of such safeguards told the lawmaker that the company could implement them.
“They never put anything in writing, but when I had technical discussions,” Foster said, the reaction was, “yeah, of course we can do this.” This private acknowledgement to Foster goes farther than anything Nvidia has previously stated.
Other technology built by Nvidia for its customers suggests that the company can indeed offer accurate tracking of its chips’ locations. In December 2025, Nvidia announced a new tool called Fleet Intelligence that would allow its 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.
MIT Technology Review asked Nvidia in early October if its Fleet Intelligence tool could be used to prevent smuggling, which lawmakers were reportedly increasingly concerned about Nvidia’s role in. The company declined to answer directly, instead sending a statement: “Governments and media have found insignificant diversion of controlled U.S. 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.
The Chip Security Act as drafted would require a mechanism to track the locations of chips, either by inspections of facilities, attestations by companies, or ping-based location mechanisms. The ping-based technique, the hardest option to circumvent, would require the GPU to send a signal of its location when it comes online. In September, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology found it would be the most cost-effective option.