Nvidia builds location verification tech that could help fight chip smuggling

Nvidia has built location verification technology that could indicate which country its chips are operating in, the company confirmed on Wednesday, a move that could help prevent its artificial intelligence chips from being smuggled into countries where their export is banned.

The feature, which Nvidia has demonstrated privately in recent months but has not yet released, would be a software option that customers could install. It would tap into what are known as the confidential computing capabilities of its graphics processing units (GPUs).

The software was built to allow customers to track a chip’s overall computing performance – a common practice among companies that buy fleets of processors for large data centres – and would use the time delay in communicating with servers run by Nvidia to give a sense of the chip’s location on par with what other internet-based services can provide, according to an Nvidia official.

In a blog post the day after Reuters exclusively reported the existence of the software, Nvidia provided more details on how it would work, including that it plans to make it open-source, which would allow outside security researchers to examine it.

“We’re in the process of implementing a new software service that empowers data centre operators to monitor the health and inventory of their entire AI GPU fleet,” Nvidia said in a statement. “This customer-installed software agent leverages GPU telemetry to monitor fleet health, integrity and inventory.”