Nvidia representatives told U.S. Rep. Bill Foster, D-Ill., in private technical talks that the company could implement location-tracking safeguards for advanced AI chips sought in the Chip Security Act, Foster told MIT Technology Review on Thursday¹.

Foster, a co-sponsor of the 2025 bill and a member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, said the company never put the view in writing¹. In those discussions, he said, the reaction was, “yeah, of course we can do this”¹.

The Semiconductor Industry Association, of which Nvidia is a member, opposed the bill in March 2026 and wrote that chip-tracking mandates were new, untested, and potentially infeasible, MIT Technology Review reported¹. When the bill was introduced in May 2025, lawmakers said the needed technology already existed, something Nvidia had not publicly confirmed, the magazine said¹.

The Chip Security Act is among three chip-security bills under consideration for the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act, according to the report, which said the measures have drawn renewed attention after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s resignation and a reported affair with an alleged Chinese spy¹.

Nvidia did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s requests for comment or confirmation of Foster’s account¹. In early October, asked whether its Fleet Intelligence tool could be used to prevent smuggling, the company declined to answer directly and instead said governments and media had found “insignificant diversion of controlled U.S. products” compared with China’s domestic compute, the magazine reported¹.

In December 2025, Nvidia announced Fleet Intelligence software for customers to monitor chip performance across data-center sites; Nvidia told Reuters then that the tool could indicate which country chips were in but would not say whether it could stop smuggling, MIT Technology Review said¹.

As drafted, the bill would require tracking by facility inspections, company attestations or ping-based location signals when a GPU comes online, the report said¹. Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology found in September that ping-based tracking would be the most cost-effective option, according to the magazine¹.

If those rules pass in the NDAA, Foster said, they would show investigators where chips are but would not disconnect smuggled units¹. He told the magazine he intends to introduce stricter legislation next year that would require licenses to operate advanced GPUs, verified before a chip could connect¹. Foster said he did not ask Nvidia why it was not adopting tracking voluntarily if it could do so¹.