Uncle Sam floats tracking tech to keep AI chips out of China The Trump administration wants better ways to track the location of chips, as part of attempts to prevent advanced AI accelerator hardware from getting into Chinese hands. Washington wants to equip semiconductors with location-tracking capabilities, and is keen on working with the industry to accomplish this, according to a …
Because NO AI would be deranged enough to propose adding location tracking to actual chips...
So all TRUMP critics, who accused him on putting tariffs on penguins by stupidly following AI advice, must be WRONG.
No, really, this White House degenerates more and more into a comedy sitcom and destroys all reputation and impression of competence the U.S. might have had in the past...
Perhaps the chips could contain an explosive element, like the infamous cell phones in Lebanon a few years back. To be of any value though, it would need to have a devastating explosion that just the chip itself to take the point of export/import restrictions. Otherwise, just another chip failure to fix and move on .It should be confined to the internal case electronics, otherwise there could be too much in incidental damages.
If this goes ahead, it's possible that companies like Nvidia may implement it by putting a module in all their chips which requires regularly updated licensing certificates. When the certificate is about to expire, the owner downloads an encrypted and digitally signed certificate request from each chip and forwards these to Nvidia along with payment. Nvidia then compares the serial numbers in the requests to their list of authorized users and who the payment came from (via a list of authorized banks only, who would be in charge of verifying the identity and location of the originator of the funds), and then sends back a bundle of updated encrypted and digitally signed license certificates which the user then uploads to each corresponding chip. You no longer would buy an Nvidia AI chip, you would only license it.
The above may not be how they end up doing it, but I suspect that something like the above would meet the intent of the legislation.
I can't imagine the Chinese government allowing putting an American kill switch into their AI infrastructure, so that would basically kill Nvidia sales in China, and probably a lot of other countries too.
I don't see how that's technically possible without compromising the chip or system architecture but then I'm just a mere engineer, not a Hollywood scriptwriter.
This thinking is about the same level of technical maturity as that of the movie "Small Soldiers". Its a fun story, a lot of fun (likely to make as well as watch) but technically its complete nonsense. But it is a good guide to what a lot of people -- including educated people who should know better -- think of as technology. It is truly "indistinguishable from magic"!
The idea is stupid, but the implementation suggested is probably the closest you can come to it and not be making up technologies that don't exist. A location tracker that transmits is not going to be able to communicate to people to care. One that locks can be spoofed to not or would do nothing if it was simply operated outside China for Chinese users. But requiring cryptographic unlocks on a schedule is something you can implement with a little shim in the controller to be able to transmit them and some microcode to validate them. Of course, in addition to the annoying everybody problem the original comment correctly identified, there's also the problem that this method wouldn't work too well at preventing chips from getting used in China any more than the restrictions on exporting them prevented that, since the people who exported illegally can also proxy activation data. It's mostly a waste of time to try to design the crazy tech magic politicians demand, but sometimes, it can be an interesting exercise anyway.
That scheme reminds me of the (much reviled, for good reasons) pay-to-play Intel On Demand Xeon Scalable six-step activation configuration process for the "optional" accelerators present on every chip.
Maybe, here, folks could get (for example) an H20 with the extra H200 silicon disabled until activation (with a tamper-sensitive self-destruct feature)?
> not be making up technologies that don't exist
No, instead they are making up financial systems that don't exist. The suggestion that you would have banks "who would be in charge of verifying the identity and location of the originator of the funds" is in any way feasable is as ignorant of the global financial sytems compelexities as the original suggestion is of the terchnological complexities of tracking a NPU.
Again, pursuing this as only a thought exercise, that's not impossible. There are many audit systems that do check for the identity of a company, and there are even audits that check where they got money they're now trying to spend. Nothing would prevent someone from trying to mandate that anyone renewing a license gets a full audit first, and the companies to do it exist. Their solution of having a bank validate a customer is much smaller than that. The problem is not creating a financial system that doesn't exist but instead that this would be costly and not necessarily effective because corporate proxies are relatively easy to create.
"that would basically kill Nvidia sales in China, and probably a lot of other countries too"
Even in the US, I wouldn't license/lease a chip. And if I buy a bit of hardware, I expect it to run until it fails, and not just stop because it can't phone home or it decided I hadn't paid for it (when I did).
Not for nothing, but this "lol Trump is dumb" story would be framed in histrionic "oh no, Big Brother is coming!" terms if it was the Chinese government proposing to implement this sort of tracking tech on chips that might end up in the United States.
Both framings are simultaneously 100% correct: it's dystopian and totalitarian, and it's also extremely dumb.
That said, when/if the Chinese government proposes similar measures, hopefully it'll be remembered that the U.S. government did it first.
Or, hopefully, it'll be remembered that the U.S. was first to (rather baselessly) accuse China of planting spying gear into its tech, in 2018, and then the PRC just plagiarized our unsubstantiated claims with its own unfounded accusations that we're actually the ones doing it in our tech (2025).
Pretty soon you'll see the Chinese Gov plagiarizing our brand new drive to location-track every single chip produced here in Taiwan US, with a photocopied effort to GPS-track every atom of silicon etched at SMIC, down to the nearest millimeter ...
The silver lining in all of this is that it will lead to major savings at NSA (and equivalent PRC outfit), likely $billions, by removing the need to intercept Amazon (Alibaba) laptop deliveries mid-flight and manually install eavesdropping implants in them, which is both labor intensive and time consuming.
I leave it to you to figure out who will be the first to plagiarize the other in adopting this valuable cost-reduction tech! </sarc>
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