Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) is firmly denying rumors that its chips contain secret backdoors or kill switches, calling the idea reckless and flat-out wrong.
The company’s response comes after China summoned the chipmaker last week over concerns tied to its H20 AI chips. In a blog post Tuesday, Nvidia said it has never embedded backdoors into its hardware and wouldn’t, because it would be a gift to hackers and hostile actors. It warned that building in secret kill switches would not only be dangerous, but could erode global trust in U.S. tech.
There’s no such thing as a good’ secret backdoor, Nvidia wrote. Single-point controls are a bad idea, and vulnerabilities should be fixed not created.
The comments land just as U.S. lawmakers propose tighter controls on chip exports, including adding tech to verify chip locations. Nvidia’s H20 shipments to China were recently greenlit under a limited export exemption, following a broader ban in April.
Even though Nvidia says there are no backdoors or kill switches in its chips, Chinese regulators aren’t totally convinced. They’re worried those features might still be possible, at least in part.
That puts Nvidia in a tough spot caught between Washington pushing for AI dominance and Beijing demanding full hardware transparency. The H20 chip, built to stay within U.S. export rules, has ended up right in the middle of that power struggle.
In the high-stakes AI chip war, Nvidia is drawing a clear lineno hidden access, no kill switch, no compromises on trust. All eyes now turn to how U.S.-China tech relations evolve from here.
This article first appeared on GuruFocus.