US Bill Aims To Crack Down On Smuggling NVIDIA's AI Chips To China With Boot Locks
Chip smugglers have reportedly found all kinds of creative ways to sneak semiconductors into China, such as hiding them with live lobsters, inside fake baby bumps, and other means designed to evade customs and, more broadly, import and export restrictions. In an effort to crack down on chip smuggling, a U.S. lawmaker is hoping to pass a bill to force NVIDIA (and presumably other chip companies) to equip their semiconductors with tracking technology.
Bill Foster, a former particle physicist and now a Democratic U.S. Representative, is spearheading the bipartisan bill. In comments made to Reuters, Foster claims the technology exists to track chips after they have been sold, despite NVIDIA last year claiming it "cannot track products after they are sold" in reference to pre-owned Jetson products finding their way to second-hand markets.
"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 said.
NVIDIA has positioned itself as a dominant force in the AI chip race, with an extensive and growing line of powerful GPUs, accelerators, and complete platform solutions. This can be seen in NVIDIA's quarterly financial reports, the most recent of which highlights an 18% sequential and 2x year-over-year jump in data center compute revenue to $35.6 billion on red hot demand for AI chips.
According to the Reuters, what the bill envisions is not some sort of precise GPS implementation, but having NVIDIA bake in the ability for its chips to ping a server. The time it takes for a signal to reach a server would then be used to determine the location of a chip.
While not precise, the idea would be to track chips more generally, which would allow NVIDIA and the U.S. government to determine if advanced AI semiconductors are finding their way to China. However, that's not the only thing the bill would introduce.
It also aims to have NVIDIA (and presumably others) implement a kill switch of sorts, to prevent chips from booting if they evade export controls and end up in places where they shouldn't be. From our vantage point, it would act like wheel clamp (or boot), whereby illegally parked vehicles are prevented from driving away.
