According to the latest revelation, Nvidia has developed a chip positioning technology that can display which country its AI chips are running in!

Insiders say that this feature is a software option that Nvidia has privately demonstrated to customers in recent months but has not yet released, and will utilize its GPU's so-called 'confidential computing power'.

NVIDIA indirectly confirmed this news through a statement. Nvidia stated, 'We are implementing a new software service that enables data center operators to monitor the health and inventory of their entire AI GPU cluster.'. This software agent installed by the customer utilizes GPU telemetry technology to monitor the health, integrity, and inventory of the cluster. ”

The NVIDIA staff said that the software was originally designed to help customers track the overall computing performance of the chip, but it can also estimate the approximate geographical location of the chip by measuring the delay time when the chip communicates with the NVIDIA server. Its accuracy is comparable to other Internet based services. The staff also stated that this feature will first be available on Nvidia's next-generation Blackwell architecture chips, but Nvidia is also researching solutions for previous generations of products.

According to reports, Nvidia's latest development of this positioning feature is aimed at countries such as China that are subject to US export controls. For a long time, the US government has banned companies such as Nvidia and AMD from exporting high-performance chips to China on the grounds of so-called "national security", and there has been repeated speculation in the US that "Nvidia chips are being smuggled in large quantities to banned countries". Therefore, the report points out that this positioning function aims to prevent the "smuggling" of Nvidia chips.

If officially released, this technology may respond to calls from the White House and members of both parties in the US Congress to take measures to prevent the smuggling of AI chips to countries with sales restrictions, such as China. As the US Department of Justice files criminal charges against a group suspected of smuggling Nvidia chips worth over $160 million to China, the voices are growing louder.

At the same time, the US requirement for location verification has prompted Chinese cybersecurity regulators to interview Nvidia, questioning whether its products contain "backdoors" that allow the US to bypass chip security features.

This week, regulatory clouds resurfaced after US President Trump announced that he would allow the export of Nvidia H200 chips (the direct predecessor of the current flagship product Blackwell chips) to China. Foreign policy experts are skeptical about whether Chinese companies will be allowed to make purchases.

Nvidia firmly denies the existence of backdoors in its chips. Software experts point out that Nvidia is fully capable of achieving chip positioning verification without compromising product security.

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