The Race to Build a "Find My" for AI Chips

As advanced AI chips continue to reach China despite 2022 U.S. export restrictions, the U.S. is turning to location verification, including a House Foreign Affairs Committee bill passed last March requiring it for advanced AI chips. Proposed approaches include ping-based location verification (PLV), which times signals between a chip and trusted landmark servers, and encrypted "sovereignty certificates" signed with a chip's hardware root of trust, supplemented by physical audits and hardware fingerprinting. Researchers note PLV can only detect diversion after it happens, cannot track offline chips, and is costly, while Chinese firms can still legally access AI chips abroad via cloud providers.