The United States has decided to pursue additional bipartisan regulations after high-performance U.S.-made semiconductors have been smuggled into China, circumventing export controls.
According to Reuters on May 5 (local time), U.S. Representative Bill Foster (Democrat, Illinois) plans to introduce a bill that would require the installation of technology to track whether U.S.-made semiconductors produced by companies such as Nvidia are being diverted to countries where exports are prohibited after sale.
Representative Foster's bill calls on the Department of Commerce to establish detailed regulations reflecting these requirements within six months.
According to the bill, in addition to tracking the location of semiconductor chips, it also requires the introduction of technology that would prevent the chips from booting if they are found to be in countries where exports are banned.
Foster emphasized the need for the bill, telling Reuters that there are multiple credible reports of large-scale smuggling of U.S.-made semiconductors.
He warned, "This is not a problem of the future happening in our imagination. This is a current problem, and at some point, we will find that the Chinese Communist Party or the Chinese military is using these chips to design weapons or conduct AI operations."
Until now, the United States has banned the export of AI semiconductors from companies such as Nvidia and AMD to China since the previous Joe Biden administration. However, loopholes in the sanctions have continued to be pointed out, as the market for smuggled Nvidia chips in China has rapidly expanded.
Recently, suspicions have also been raised that DeepSeek, a Chinese company that shocked the world with low-cost, high-performance AI, used advanced Nvidia semiconductors by circumventing U.S. export controls, further fueling calls for stronger regulations.
In response, Nvidia has stated that it is complying with U.S. government sanctions but that it is realistically difficult to control indirect exports to China because it cannot fully track the subsequent movement of all chips sold.
In contrast, Representative Foster argued that technology to track the location of sold semiconductor chips has already been developed and could be implemented in the field without much difficulty.
Reuters, citing sources familiar with the matter, reported that while AI chip location tracking technology is not yet widely used, some companies such as Google are already tracking the location of AI chips used internally for security purposes.
Several Democratic lawmakers, including Raja Krishnamoorthi, a member of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, have expressed support for the bill that Representative Foster plans to introduce.
Reuters also reported that some Republican lawmakers, although the bill has not yet been formally introduced, have indicated their support.
John Moolenaar, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, told Reuters that he supports the concept of semiconductor location tracking and plans to meet with members of both the House and Senate regarding the bill this week.
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