Senator Tom Cotton’s legislation seeks to “prevent advanced American chips from falling into the hands of adversaries like Communist China.”
Last week, a U.S. congressman announced a plan to introduce a bill that would mandate producers of high-performance AI processors to track them geographically in a bid to limit their usage by unauthorized foreign actors, such as China. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas then introduced a legislative measure later in the week. The bill covers hardware that goes way beyond just AI processors, and would give the Commerce Secretary power to verify the location of hardware, and put mandatory location controls on commercial companies. To make matters even more complicated, geo-tracking features would be required for high-performance graphics cards as well.
The bill covers a wide range of products classified as 3A090, 4A090, 4A003.z, and 3A001.z export control classification numbers (ECCNs), so advanced processors for AI, AI servers (including rack-scale solutions), HPC servers, and general-purpose electronics of strategic concern due to potential military utility or dual-use risk. It should be noted that many high-end graphics cards (such as Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 5090) are also classified as a 3A090 product, so it looks like such add-in-boards will also have to add geo-tracking capabilities.