China smuggling AI chips: US lawmaker proposes law to track Nvidia GPUs

A US lawmaker is reportedly planning to propose legislation to track the location of artificial intelligence (AI) chips, including those made by Nvidia , after they are sold. This effort aims to address reports of widespread smuggling of Nvidia's chips into China, which violates US export control laws , the report claims. Nvidia's chips are crucial for creating AI systems, including chatbots, image generators and specialised apps like those used for biological weapons. Both current US President Donald Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, have implemented increasingly strict export controls on Nvidia's chips to China. However, reports indicate that some of these chips have continued to flow into China. While Nvidia has also stated publicly that it cannot track its products after they are sold.

How the US lawmaker is planning to track Nvidia’s chips in China
According to a report by the news agency Reuters, the plan has drawn bipartisan support from US lawmakers, and independent technical experts have also supported this view. US Representative Bill Foster, a Democrat from Illinois and former particle physicist, believes the technology to track chips post-sale is readily available, often already integrated into Nvidia's chips. Foster, who has designed multiple computer chips, plans to introduce a bill directing US regulators to create rules for:

• Tracking chips to ensure they are in authorised locations under export control licenses.
• Preventing chips from booting up if they are not properly licensed under export controls.

What the US lawmaker said about the proposed legislation
In a statement to Reuters, Foster said that credible, though in some cases confidential, reports indicate chip smuggling to China is still occurring on a large scale.

"This is not an imaginary future problem. It is a problem now, and at some point we're going to discover that the Chinese Communist Party, or their military, is busy designing weapons using large arrays of chips, or even just working on (artificial general intelligence), which is as immediate as nuclear technology,” Foster noted.

Chip smuggling has become more urgent after China’s DeepSeek AI (which analysts say uses U.S.-prohibited Nvidia chips) posed a serious challenge to American systems, and Singapore prosecutors charged three Chinese nationals over a fraud case involving servers that may have contained those chips.

Although location-verification technology isn’t yet widely deployed, companies like Google already track their in-house AI chips for security. Foster’s proposed legislation will require the Commerce Department to issue rules mandating such tracking within six months.