Hardware

It's in Nvidia's legal team hands what path to take. Likely they would do anything to avoid us lawmakers ire.

I imagine The bar they must clear in the case of a court case is if Nvidia took all reasonable precautions to stop the cards performance from exceeding the limit.

If you read this thread everyones reaction to the idea of software lockdown was ridicule, and there are professionals out there that think the same,there are always bugs and workarounds, it's just for most secure software the holes aren't worth the time and effort to look for them ,in AI space however I think the rewards would be worth it to try and crack a software lock .

For example intel has one of the best software lockdown in the industry for their locked CPUs and then those CPUs got a de facto overclock from a motherboard beta bios. The failure here was on intels partners not their software but the overclock happened. If the same where to happen to an Nvidia card any half decent lawyer would ask why didn't you fuse off the SMs, even if there were legitimate reason for a software lock. The fact there is a sure fire way to stay within the limit is what could damn Nvidia.

The fear here is the us government losses trust in Nvidia and their willingness to play ball if they get up to some shenanigans and make an outright gpu ban.

The regulations specify the performance ceiling. Nvidia just ships products slower than that