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 senior White House official.

The purpose is to enable the US to follow where shipments of key products for AI development, such as Nvidia GPUs, are actually ending up, so as to aid efforts to prevent smuggling of the components into China.

"There is discussion about potentially the types of software or physical changes you could make to the chips themselves to do better location-tracking," Michael Kratsios told Bloomberg.

Kratsios is understood to be one of those behind the White House's AI Action Plan unveiled last month.

However, he said he has not so far spoken directly with either Nvidia ...