Nvidia Develops Software to Track Location of AI Chips Amid Reports of Smuggling
Nvidia is reportedly working on software that can trace the whereabouts of its AI chips as concerns over chip smuggling into China continue to rise.
According to Reuters, Nvidia has created location verification technology that can identify the country where a chip is situated. This software leverages computing performance tracking and the delay in server communication to determine the location of a chip.
The use of this tracking software will be optional for customers and is expected to be initially rolled out for Blackwell chips, as per Reuters.
Recent reports have surfaced alleging that China’s DeepSeek AI models have been trained using illicitly obtained Nvidia Blackwell chips. Nvidia has refuted these claims, stating that they have not found any evidence of such smuggling activities.
In response to the allegations, an Nvidia spokesperson told JS, “We haven’t seen any substantiation or received tips of ‘phantom data centers’ constructed to deceive us and our OEM partners, then deconstructed, smuggled, and reconstructed somewhere else. While such smuggling seems far-fetched, we pursue any tip we receive.”
This development comes shortly after Nvidia received approval from the U.S. government to sell its H200 AI chips to authorized customers in China. However, this approval only applies to older H200 chips and not the newer Blackwell chips.
