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.

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