Too slow Uncle Round Eye.
From The Register, August 5:
Plan would embed location verification in advanced semiconductors to combat black market exports
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 or AMD, the other major supplier of advanced GPUs used in AI training....
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And from EE Times, August 4:
China’s Nvidia Probe Warns U.S. Not to Track Chips
China’s probe into Nvidia H20 GPUs, exports of which U.S. President Donald Trump allowed weeks ago to China, is a warning to U.S. legislators not to mandate tracking hardware in U.S. chips that are vital to China’s AI advancement, Paul Triolo, a partner with Albright Stonebridge Group in Washington D.C., told EE Times.
China’s cyberspace regulator last week demanded that Nvidia discuss possible security issues in the H20, a GPU designed for China that’s less powerful than Nvidia GPUs like the H100 and H200. Trump on July 15 lifted the U.S. H20 ban for China, part of a “general gutting” of the policy regime around technology under former U.S. President Joe Biden, Triolo said.
China’s Nvidia investigation is likely aimed at blocking the U.S. Chip Security Act, proposed in May in Congress and the Senate. The draft legislation would require tracking mechanisms in export-controlled advanced chips.
Trump’s latest move to de-escalate the ongoing tech war between China and the U.S. is aimed at persuading China to open exports of rare earths and permanent magnets to the U.S., according to Triolo, an electronics engineer who has worked for the U.S. government in China. China’s export controls on rare earths announced in April could impact the semiconductor industry as soon as next year.
“First was the need for the U.S. to make some concession on export controls to gain China’s agreement to ease up on rare earth and magnet licensing,” Triolo said. “In addition, the arguments made by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on the H20 resonated with White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks’ view that the U.S. should not abandon the China market to domestic companies such as Huawei, as this would drive China’s development of a more capable alternative AI stack, which could then be exported outside China and compete with the U.S. Trump appears to have bought this argument during meetings with Huang and Sacks.”
Nvidia told EE Times in a statement, “Cybersecurity is critically important to us. Nvidia does not have ‘backdoors’ in our chips that would give anyone a remote way to access or control them.” The company declined EE Times’ request for an interview to provide more detail.
The U.S. has its own suspicions of backdoors, kill switches and other security vulnerabilities in Chinese devices. Chinese-made printed circuit boards in U.S. military systems and infrastructure like power grids probably provide China kill switches and other backdoors that the nation could use in the event of war, a former Department of Defense (DoD) official told EE Times last year.
Tracking chips
Chinese authorities are alarmed by the recent focus in Washington on mandating global geolocational tracking systems for advanced GPUs, Triolo said.“The White House AI Action Plan also contains a short nod to considering the benefits of such as tracking system,” Triolo said. “In addition, some think tanks that address AI policy have put out studies suggesting that the cost of implementing such a tracking system for Nvidia would be fairly low and could be built on existing capabilities already inherent in the hardware. This last contention likely is what set off Chinese officials and prompted the summons for Nvidia to explain its position in terms of both the technology and the policy debate in Washington.”
There are few signs of an end game in the tech war as China becomes more technologically independent....
....MUCH MORE
So a no to the kill switch idea as well.
