Nvidia has developed location verification technology that can tell which country its chips are operating in. The company said the move will help prevent the smuggling of artificial intelligence chips to countries where their export is banned.
Nvidia has developed location verification technology that can tell which country its chips are operating in. The company said the move will help prevent the smuggling of artificial intelligence chips to countries where their export is banned.
The feature, which Nvidia has been privately demonstrating in recent months but has yet to make public, will be a software option that customers can install at will, using so-called “confidential computing” capabilities built into the company’s GPUs, Reuters reported .
The software was designed to allow customers to track overall computing performance — a common practice for companies purchasing large batches of processors for large data centers. An Nvidia spokesperson said the system would use latency from the company's servers to determine the chip's location on a level similar to that provided by other internet services.
“We are in the process of rolling out a new software service that gives data center operators the ability to monitor the health and inventory of their entire AI processor fleet,” Nvidia said in a statement. “This customer-installable software agent uses GPU telemetry to monitor the health, integrity, and accounting of the equipment.”
The company also stated that "there are no features that allow Nvidia to remotely control or take action on registered systems," and that telemetry data sent to Nvidia servers is "read-only," meaning the company's servers cannot write the data back to the chip.
“There are no features in Nvidia GPUs that would allow the company or third parties to remotely shut down the chip,” Nvidia said. “There is no ‘panic button.’” According to a company representative, this feature will first appear on the latest Blackwell chips, which have more security measures for a process called ‘attestation’ than previous generations of Ampere and Hopper. However, Nvidia is already considering options for implementing this technology for older generations.
Nvidia's release of location-tracking technology could satisfy demands from the White House and both parties in Congress, who are pushing for tighter controls on the export of AI processors to sanctioned countries, including China. The pressure on the tech giant has increased amid a Justice Department investigation into a criminal scheme that allegedly smuggled more than $160 million worth of Nvidia products into China .
But calls for location verification in the US also prompted China’s top cybersecurity regulator to summon Nvidia officials for an explanation. The regulator was interested in whether the company’s products contained “backdoors” that would allow the US to bypass security features in its chips. The company strongly denies this.
The issue of government surveillance has flared up again this week, with US President Donald Trump announcing his approval for the sale of Nvidia H200 chips (the previous generation to Blackwell) to China . However, international affairs experts doubt that Beijing will give its companies the green light to such purchases.
