Beijing summons Nvidia over alleged backdoors in China-bound AI chips China's internet watchdog has hauled Nvidia in for a grilling over alleged backdoors in its H20 chips, the latest twist in the increasingly paranoid semiconductor spat between Washington and Beijing. Nvidia was recently given the thumbs-up to resume sales of its made-for-China H20 AI chips after Washington quietly reversed an …
Or the concrete reinforced roof of the datacenter.
There's zero chance that GPS integrated onto an AI chip/board would be operable in any AI datacenter. I suspect the whole thing is disinformation to get China chasing their tails and being afraid to buy US made AI chips.
It could maybe work if it is bluetooth based though as mentioned below, though that would be fairly easy to detect.
Plus, China's been doing it to us since 2018 (at least), so ... (or vice versa!)
There was never any proof that was true. If it was happening someone somewhere would have publicly produced one of those chips, it would have been investigated and we'd have read follow up articles that reported on its capabilities.
None of that happened, because that article was a bunch of bs.
Aw come on, get real! They clearly used "grain of rice" chips grown in special underground paddy field labs to spy on our motherboards in 2018 and so, tits-for-tarts, and tots, it's just the poetic justice of international covert gastronomy that we should now use our own stealthy homegrown double-whopper with cheese heatsink and potato chips technology to do the same to them, with added artery clogginess for good measure, no!?!? Plus this advanced stuff will turn their teeth blue iiuc ... or vice-versace, fashionably!
In the end, they can try to liquid cool it with rice wine all they want, we've got them by the twin nuts and bolts of cardiac arrhythmia, and heartburn indigestion!
The Supermicro "backdoors" which Bloomberg claimed existed were never found.
Bloomberg only gave one named source to support their story. Most of the media did not bother verifying Bloomberg's claims, but just repeated them.
One outlet from Australia did however go directly to that source and asked him about the story. Bloomberg's own "source" said he thought the Bloomberg story was utter nonsense and that he himself had never said what Bloomberg had claimed he did. Instead he said that Bloomberg had only asked how it would be possible on a hypothetical basis to embed backdoor chips into a motherboard. He however had never claimed that there was any evidence found of anyone actually doing it and was not aware of any evidence for anyone actually doing it.
Bloomberg publishes a lot of very questionable stuff. Don't take anything you hear from them as being fact without checking if there is independent verification elsewhere.
Draft legislation was introduced in the US in the spring to require all US AI chips and devices containing such chips to have tracking and identification technology to be designed into them. So far it has not been passed into law.
The legislation itself does not apparently contain any details on how such tracking and identification would actually work, just that manufacturers would be required to come up with something and implement it.
So if the legislation passes then Nvidia would be required by US law to have such a system embedded in all their AI oriented chips sold outside of the US.
Personally, I suspect that the laws of physics would limit what can be done in this respect, regardless of what the laws of the US may be. I could see as a hypothetical example having a backdoor built into each chip which requires a "phone home" over the Internet for license re-authorization on a regular basis, with each serial number being tracked by Nvidia with respect to which customer is using it. That wouldn't be too different from how a lot of software is sold.
Given the above, I can see the Chinese authorities having Nvidia come in for a talk on what their plans are for complying with this US legislation should it come into effect. The Chinese government could then decide whether to allow the Nvidia chips into the country.
Having an Airtag compatible bluetooth transmitter on the AI boards is actually the only effective way I could see this working. It sure as heck can't use GPS. But an intermittent bluetooth transmitter that was pinging the iPhones and Androids of staff walking the aisles would allow that location information to get back home. The "kill switch" could be operated by treating it as putting that device in "lost mode" but instead of making a sound it blows an internal fuse in the chip to permanently disable it.
Well Done Beijing.
This sort of remote tracking and shutdown features would be totally typical of the crap the USA legislates to be installed in their products.
No doubt there is even more to allow spying by the NSA, FBI and CIA.
The USA is desperate & running scared, their dominance is waning fast, better off to just continue building and developing your own chips.
