US authorities have secretly placed location tracking devices in targeted shipments of advanced chips they see as being at high risk of illegal diversion to China, according to two people with direct knowledge of the previously unreported law enforcement tactic.
The measures aimed to detect artificial intelligence chips being diverted to destinations that were under US export restrictions, and applied only to select shipments under investigation, the people said.
They show the lengths to which the US has gone to enforce its chip export restrictions on China, even as the Trump administration has sought to relax some curbs on Chinese access to advanced American semiconductors.
The trackers could help build cases against people and companies who profit from violating US export controls, said the people who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Location trackers are a decades-old investigative tool used by US law enforcement agencies to track products subject to export restrictions, such as aeroplane parts. They had been used to combat the illegal diversion of semiconductors in recent years, one source said.
Five other people actively involved in the AI server supply chain said they were aware of the use of the trackers in shipments of servers from manufacturers such as Dell and Supermicro, which include chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
