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US Senators Push to Geotrack High-End GPUs in New Chip Security Bill

AleksandarK

AleksandarK

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US lawmakers are moving forward with a proposal requiring high-performance graphics cards and AI processors to carry built-in geotracking technology to keep sensitive chips out of hostile hands. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas introduced the Chip Security Act on May 12, 2025. Under this legislation, the Commerce Department would have the authority to mandate location-verification features in any device subject to US export controls, with manufacturers given six months after enactment to comply. The bill applies to a broad set of products classified under export control classification numbers 3A090, 4A090, 4A003.z, and 3A001.z. That includes everything from advanced AI accelerators and rack-scale servers to certain gaming graphics cards like NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5090. Manufacturers would be required to embed hardware or firmware capable of reporting each device's physical location back to a centralized registry maintained by the Commerce Department.

Exporters must also notify the Bureau of Industry and Security immediately if a unit is diverted, tampered with, or appears at an unauthorized location. To keep pace with evolving security threats, the legislation calls for a joint one-year study by the Commerce Department and the Department of Defense on potential new tracking and safeguard mechanisms. Following that, the two departments would conduct annual reviews for three years. If they determine that additional measures are warranted, they would have two years to draft and finalize rules that outline new requirements and present a detailed implementation roadmap to Congress. NVIDIA has noted that its current architectures are not built for post-sale tracking, and adding such a capability could delay product launch schedules and increase development costs. AMD and Intel are likely to face similar obstacles, as integrating secure location-verification may require redesigning sensitive intellectual property and altering established supply-chain processes.




The bill risks imposing burdensome regulations that could undermine America's global market competitiveness while driving illicit chip trading further underground. Supporters counter that granular control over where each chip ends up is essential to protect the US technological leadership in AI and high-performance computing. As the measure heads to committee hearings, we will witness whether geotracking represents a reasonable security precaution or an overreach that may hurt innovation.

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They do this with high end CNC and CMM tables. A lot of them you can’t move more than 10 feet before you have a problem.
 
They'll have internal GPS? How can this work inside a datacentre? Or they'll use IP or some other technology?

It would seem to be a bureaucratic nightmare and probably bad actors will simply circumvent it with ease, unless it's really carefully thought through.
 
freeagent said:
They do this with high end CNC and CMM tables. A lot of them you can’t move more than 10 feet before you have a problem.
Click to expand...

How does it work for those products? Do the machines have built in GPS that then phones home to a server somewhere? Does it not work if it can't talk to the server?
 
There's chatter of them trying this with vehicles here in Michigan, so they can track how far you drive and tax per mile, dangling the carrot of eliminating the gas tax.
 
Nater said:
There's chatter of them trying this with vehicles here in Michigan, so they can track how far you drive and tax per mile, dangling the carrot of eliminating the gas tax.
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Drive with your phone in your pocket? Do you have GPS on your Dash. It is just an update in code to turn those into what you describe.
 
What is to stop the Chinese from opening a shell corp. and operating the high-End processing in the U.S?
 
Mr. Perfect said:
Do the machines have built in GPS that then phones home to a server somewhere? Does it not work if it can't talk to the server?
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Yes, a lot of them have sat communication. Its to make sure high end machine tools don't end up in the wrong hands making missiles and stuff.
 
Tons of high end gear is tracked. GPUs ceased being for gaming really with the 8800 GTX and CUDA. Nvidia was always open about it. So now they are being treated as the high end equipment they are. If you ever bought a GPU from the 8800 onward you not only voted for this you paid and cheered as loudly as possible for this to happen and also move PC gaming to the cloud.
 
NV already does this through their driver telemetry. It's just a matter of asking NV to share that info with the government. This is the only way to stop NV from selling most of their GPUs to China.
 
Competent Chinese GPU's are inevitable and moving ahead faster than before. That's why they are being aggresive to inflict as much damage to Chinese AI efforts now while they somewhat can.

I'm just rooting for cheaper and better GPUs for gamers and artists. AMD/Nvidia duopoly needs to be broken. And yes, clearly AMD is not trying to compete and happly engaging in an unspoken secretive duopoly. High AMD profit margins are clear proof of this. A competing company sacrifices margins for competition(e.g. sacrificing margins by hiring more software engineers), this does not happen with AMD, they are a duopoly.
 
Nice, the US and Nvidia will now know all server farms and the whereabouts of all rich gamers if this is accepted.

Nvidia looks at a random country: they only bought 2 RTX5090, don't send more stock for 4 months, they don't need it.
 
lexluthermiester said:
This goes too far. We are treading into goose-stepping territory stuff here..
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Yup... they are so scared of China having GPUs and other HPC/AI tech but China is already developing their own and admittedly doing quite good with that. So what tf is the point of this paranoia?? Just more excuses for govt Intrusion into everything!!!
 
Pretty sure that kind of tracking on a personal level is illegal outside of America in many countries and laws exist to prevent that.
 
lexluthermiester said:
And? Did you read the article or did you look at the headline followed by the picture?
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Did both. Do not want to get political but he was also Complicit in J6.
 
WatchThe80s said:
Nice, the US and Nvidia will now know all server farms and the whereabouts of all rich gamers if this is accepted.

Nvidia looks at a random country: they only bought 2 RTX5090, don't send more stock for 4 months, they don't need it.
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If your computer is on the Internet, they know exactly where it is, and what is in it. Microsoft provides 99% of it's telemetary to all governments round the world, as does Nvidia via it's driver telemetry. You're a fool if you think this doesn't happen.
 
I thought nVidia already collects the telemetry data with everything there, including ones location...
 
Rightness_1 said:
If your computer is on the Internet, they know exactly where it is, and what is in it. Microsoft provides 99% of it's telemetary to all governments round the world, as does Nvidia via it's driver telemetry. You're a fool if you think this doesn't happen.
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And people call ME paranoid?!?

Prima.Vera said:
I thought nVidia already collects the telemetry data with everything there, including ones location...
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No. They log your IP address but that's as far as it goes. Everything else is just gpu stats.
 
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