US senator announces a bill requiring geotracking in high-end GPUs to prevent the Chinese government from wielding the ruinous power of your Nvidia RTX 4090

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The US can't afford to lose its advantage in making games look a little funny with DLSS.

Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., holds up the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 graphics processor during the company's event at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., on Sunday, Jan. 6, 2019.
(Image credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Last week, we reported on Democrat congressman Bill Foster's plans to introduce a bill that requires manufacturers of AI processors, like those in Nvidia GPUs, to implement tech that allows the US government to track where they end up. Well, it looks like the Senate didn't want to be outdone, because less than 24 hours later Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas announced the Chip Security Act, his own bill requiring AI hardware manufacturers to allow for geotracking of those all-so-important chips (via Tom'sHardware).

The press release announcing Cotton's bill, which says the legislation will keep American hardware from "falling into the hands of adversaries like Communist China," uses the word "chips" nine times. That's how you know it's serious.

Nvidia has said publicly that it isn't capable of tracking its hardware after it's been sold, and has denied concerns of widespread chip smuggling. It's worth noting, however, that TSMC—the main producer of Nvidia hardware—was facing a potential $1 billion fine just last month after one of its chips was discovered in a Huawei processor.

Lincoln Carpenter
Lincoln Carpenter
News Writer

Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.

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