MPs take action against Chinese chip smuggling

A US congressman plans to introduce a bill aimed at tracking artificial intelligence chips like those produced by Nvidia after they are sold, to prevent their smuggling to China. The bill has received bipartisan support.

According to a Reuters special report, media outlets recently revealed that large quantities of advanced Nvidia chips were being smuggled to China in violation of US export restrictions. Nvidia has stated that it is unable to track its chips after they are sold.

Senator Bill Foster, who introduced the bill, is a former physicist and has confirmed that the technology to track chips after they are sold already exists. Other experts have supported his view.

In an interview with Reuters, Bill Foster said, "This is not a futuristic question. It's a real question. At some point, we're going to discover that the Chinese Communist Party or its military sector is using a large number of chips to design weapons or develop AI technologies, at a pace comparable to the development of nuclear technology."

Nvidia has so far declined to comment on this story.

Last month, the US government issued a decisive decision banning Nvidia from exporting artificial intelligence chips to China. The company announced it would lose $5.5 billion due to this decision. The US House of Representatives Special Committee on China Affairs reported that the Chinese company DeepSeek owns 60,000 Nvidia chips, 20,000 of which are actually the type the US government has banned from exporting to China.

Nvidia announced last week that it is working on designing a new type of chip for the Chinese market, which will allow it to supply its customers in China without violating US law. It will launch this new type of chip in June.