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Nvidia news is something every modern business should have on its radar, whether you’re a small firm or a large enterprise.
Nvidia News: What You Need to Know
On 31 July, the Cyberspace Administration of China summoned Nvidia to Beijing to discuss its H20 chips. The official term was an “interview”. In practice, it meant: sit down, explain why your chips might contain backdoors, and bring the documents.
The H20 is the GPU Nvidia designed specifically for China after the US blocked exports of its high-end chips. A restricted product, engineered to fall below regulatory thresholds.
China has been buying them in large quantities for its AI projects. And now it is accusing the supplier of potentially hiding a remote shutdown mechanism inside.
Nvidia responded with a blog post. David Reber, its Chief Security Officer, wrote on 5 August: no backdoor, no kill switch, no spyware.
He added that deliberate backdoors violate the fundamental principles of cybersecurity. And technically, he is right.
A backdoor in a commercial product is a door open to everyone, not just the party who installed it.
Except.
What triggered the Chinese reaction was not a rumour or an obscure report. It was a US legislative proposal.
The “US Chip Security Act”, introduced by Senator Tom Cotton and a bipartisan group of representatives, would require chip manufacturers to integrate geolocation and verification mechanisms into exported GPUs. The text is public.
Debated in Congress. Covered by Reuters, the New York Times — everyone.
China read it and did the maths.
If your own lawmakers are tabling bills to mandate kill switches in exported chips, on what grounds do you ask us to believe there are none already? It is not an irrational line of reasoning. In fact, it is fairly logical.
Now, does Nvidia actually have a backdoor in the H20? Honestly, I do not know.
And I suspect nobody truly does. Not the Chinese.
Not the Americans. Possibly not even Nvidia as a whole — chip design chains are so fragmented that the firmware of a component can contain code the final integrator has never audited.
Anyone who has tried tracing what a baseboard management controller does at boot will understand.
Bruce Schneier commented on the matter. His view, broadly speaking: a good backdoor has three properties — it is tiny, it looks like a bug, and almost nobody knows it exists.
In an AI chip, a handful of lines of logic could be enough to trigger a shutdown under certain conditions. Try finding that in a die containing billions of transistors.
There are precedents on both sides. The NSA intercepting Cisco routers in transit to implant surveillance hardware — that is documented, drawn from the Snowden leaks.
On the Chinese side, researchers reportedly found a backdoor in MIFARE cards produced by Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics last year — I believe that was in 2024. Huawei has faced similar allegations for… quite some time.
Ten years, perhaps. The details depend on whom you believe.
Both sides have cheated. Both sides know it.
What concerns me more than the accusations is the timing. The Trump administration blocked the H20 in April.
It reversed course in July, but with a 15% tariff attached. Two weeks after sales resumed, China summoned Nvidia.
A few days later, a WeChat account affiliated with CCTV published that the H20 chips were “neither environmentally friendly, nor advanced, nor secure”, and that Chinese consumers should look elsewhere.
Elsewhere means Huawei. You understand.
An expert from China’s Ministry of Industry stated that if backdoors were confirmed, it would be “the grave Nvidia has dug for itself.” Those were the exact words. The kind of statement carefully calibrated to circulate through boardrooms in Shenzhen.
So that is where we stand. China is using a US legislative proposal as evidence against an American manufacturer, while continuing to buy its chips and simultaneously promoting domestic alternatives.
Nvidia denies everything, knowing it cannot prove a negative. And on both sides of the Pacific, IT teams are installing these GPUs into racks while quietly wondering whether the system might power down one Tuesday morning without warning.
Nvidia probably does not have a backdoor. Probably. The problem is that “probably” has not been good enough for some time now — and nobody has a better word to offer.
For official guidance on this topic, see the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) guidance.
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