The US is looking at requiring ‘software or physical changes’ to enable chip-based location tracking to stop Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips from being smuggled into China.
It looks like Nvidia is trying to stop the White House from force it to install location-tracking technology in its AI chips.
Michael Kratsios, President Trump’s advisor on technology issues, told Bloomberg there’s been discussions about using “software or physical changes” to enable chip-based location tracking to stop Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips from being smuggled into China.
On Tuesday, however, Nvidia published a blog post titled “No Backdoors. No Kill Switches. No Spyware.» It doesn’t explicitly call out the proposed location tracking system. But the company subtly suggests the idea is flawed, and can’t be implemented without a major hardware change.
“Some point to smartphone features like ‘find my phone’ or ‘remote wipe’ as models for a GPU kill switch. That comparison doesn’t hold water — optional software features, controlled by the user, are not hardware backdoors,” Nvidia says.
