Nvidia has built location verification technology which can indicate which country its chips are operating in, according to Reuters. Nvidia had privately demonstrated this feature in private in recent months, but it hasn’t been released yet. It will be an optional software update for customers to install.
According to an official at Nvidia, the software was built to allow customers to track a chip’s overall computing performance, a common practice among companies that buy fleets of processors for large data centers, and would use the time delay in communicating with servers run by Nvidia to give a sense of the chip’s location on par with what other internet-based services can provide.
“We’re in the process of implementing a new software service that empowers data center operators to monitor the health and inventory of their entire AI GPU fleet,” Nvidia said in a statement. “This customer-installed software agent leverages GPU telemetry to monitor fleet health, integrity and inventory.”
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The feature will be first made available on Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, which have more security features for a process called “attestation” than Nvidia’s previous generations of Hopper and Ampere semiconductors, but Nvidia is examining options for those prior generations, according to the Nvidia official.
If this update gets released, it would address calls from the White House and lawmakers from both major political parties for measures to prevent chip-smuggling to China. These calls have intensified since the Department of Justice brought up criminal cases related to China-connected smuggling rings allegedly bringing more than $160 million worth of Nvidia chips to China. But the calls for security verification in the U.S. have also led China’s top cybersecurity regulator to call Nvidia in for questioning about whether its products contain backdoors that would allow the U.S. to bypass its chips’ security features.
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This comes shortly after President Donald Trump announced that the United States will allow Nvidia’s H200 processors — its second-best artificial intelligence chips — to be exported to China and collect a 25% fee on such sales. The U.S. government had previously imposed strict export controls on sales of advanced AI chips to China, citing national-security concerns, while allowing certain older models to be exported under conditions that include sharing a portion of revenue (~15%) with the U.S. government.
Trump did not mention how many H200 chips would be authorized for shipment or what conditions might apply, only that exports would occur “under conditions that allow for continued strong National Security.” Officials view this as a compromise between sending Nvidia’s latest Blackwell chips to China, which Trump did not allow, and not sending any chips at all, which could potentially bolster Huawei’s efforts to sell AI chips in China.