Representatives from Nvidia told Illinois representative Bill Foster that the tracking requirements of his Chip Security Act meant to combat smuggling were technically possible, Foster told MIT Technology Review in an interview on Thursday, even while its industry group claimed they were “potentially infeasible.”
Representative Foster, a Democrat who serves on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, co-sponsored the Chip Security Act, which would introduce geotracking requirements to verify locations of advanced AI chips to prevent their smuggling to China, in 2025. It is one of three chip-security bills under consideration for inclusion in the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act, each drawing renewed attention after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s resignation and reported affair with an alleged Chinese spy.
When the Chip Security Act was introduced in May 2025, lawmakers said the technology to implement it exists, something Nvidia has not publicly confirmed. In March 2026, the Semiconductor Industry Association, of which Nvidia is a member, explicitly opposed the bill and wrote that its mandates for chip tracking were “new, untested, and potentially infeasible.”
But privately, representatives from Nvidia working with Foster on the technical possibility of such safeguards told the lawmaker that the company could implement them.
“They never put anything in writing, but when I had technical discussions,”
