'There is no such thing as a good secret backdoor,' says Nvidia, reiterating that there are no kill switches, spyware, or secret ways to access its GPUs

Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks while holding the company's new GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards and a Thor Blackwell robotics processor during the 2025 CES event in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, on Monday, Jan. 6, 2025. Huang announced a raft of new chips, software and services, aiming to stay at the forefront of artificial intelligence computing. Photographer: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

After US export restrictions were lifted on Nvidia's H20 AI processors, China's Cyberspace Administration summoned the company to explain whether or not the chips had any backdoor access. Nvidia denied that this was true, and in a new blog, it not only reiterated this statement but explained why the whole concept of a secret backdoor is nonsense in the first place.

This confirmation was provided by Nvidia's chief security officer, David Reber Jr. in a blog post titled "No Backdoors. No Kill Switches. No Spyware." He really doesn't mince his words: "Nvidia GPUs do not and should not have kill switches and backdoors." As to why this has all cropped up in the first place, it's in part due to previous demands from some US politicians that Nvidia should add tracking devices to their chips.