In the case where the network is throttling the messages or not allowing network access at all, the chip's firmware can simply refuse to activate the chip.
Now, that's not to say that this can't be gamed at all. The HFT people know very well that free space radio links are faster than fiber. You could easily just make the datacenter operators put a starlink dish on the roof though, and you can't beat the speed of light.
Now there could be ambiguous situations, such as a country where their only internet connection comes through a banned country. In that case, again, force them to put a starlink on the roof.
You can also require random on-site inspections. In order to have 10,000 GPUs in a datacenter, you'd have to declare them to the government. Not only would they have to report their position regularly, but when the inspectors showed up where they were declared to be, the inspectors would have to find them there. If they didn't, the control organization would just deactivate them. There would be some phone home interval grace period, maybe a day or two, and after that, the GPUs would just stop working until they were re-verified.
> In the case where the network is throttling the messages or not allowing network access at all, the chip's firmware can simply refuse to activate the chip.
A dumb pinging chip has 0 ways to detect network throttling. Especially when it doesn't have admin rights to said network. Also MANY use cases for these GPUs require air-gapped environments to meet compliance requirements. This wouldn't work.
> You can also require random on-site inspections. In order to have 10,000 GPUs in a datacenter, you'd have to declare them to the government.
....So the companies in Shenzhen and Guangzhou need to declare them to the U.S. government or the Chinese government? Who's gonna deactivate them then? The issue being discussed in the article has nothing to do with companies that are within U.S. jurisdiction, it's about companies/individuals outside U.S. jurisdiction.
You can use the network sort of like a GPS. If you have two nodes that can ping each other in a certain time, you multiply that by the speed of light (in the appropriate medium), and that gives you an upper bound on the distance between those nodes. You can draw circles around each beacon node and where they intersect is the possible region that the chip could be living.
If packets are being consistently delayed, the circles get big and the possible region that the chip could be in gets big. If the chip can get a few fast pings in here and there it still works ok though.
It may not be possible to provide chips like this to a truly airgapped datacenter. You could have some special piece of hardware that proxies only the pings, but that is not a true airgap.
The companies in Shenzen and Guangzhou would declare with the U.S. government, or some international organization. Obviously the Chinese government doesn't have to let inspectors into their country, but if they don't, when the GPU goes to get it's cryptographic unlock code for the day, it's not going to arrive and the GPU won't work.