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On Tuesday, 30 September 2025, the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs invoked the Goods Availability Act (Wet beschikbaarheid goederen) due to serious governance shortcomings at semiconductor manufacturer Nexperia. The company’s headquarters are located in Nijmegen, with additional subsidiaries in various countries around the world. The decision aims to prevent a situation in which the goods produced by Nexperia (finished and semi-finished products) would become unavailable in an emergency. The company’s regular production process can continue.

Reason for intervention under the Goods Availability Act
The Act has been invoked following recent and acute signals of serious governance shortcomings and actions within Nexperia. These signals posed a threat to the continuity and safeguarding on Dutch and European soil of crucial technological knowledge and capabilities. Losing these capabilities could pose a risk to Dutch and European economic security. Nexperia produces, among other things, chips used in the European automotive industry and in consumer electronics.

This measure is intended to mitigate that risk. On de basis of the order, company decisions may be blocked or reversed by the minister of Economic Affairs if they are (potentially) harmful to the interests of the company, to its future as a Dutch and European enterprise, and/or to the preservation of this critical value chain for Europe. The company’s regular production process can continue.

Invoking the Goods Availability Act by the Minister is highly exceptional. Only due to the significant scale and urgency of the governance deficiencies at Nexperia has the decision been made to apply the Act. This is a measure the government uses only when absolutely necessary. The application of this Act in this case is solely intended to prevent governance shortcomings at the specific company concerned and is not directed at other companies, the sector, or other countries. Parties may lodge an objection to this decision before the courts.

reuters.com - Aug 13 (Reuters) - U.S. authorities have secretly placed location tracking devices in targeted shipments of advanced chips they see as being at high risk of illegal diversion to China, according to two people with direct knowledge of the previously unreported law enforcement tactic.
The measures aim to detect AI chips being diverted to destinations which are under U.S. export restrictions, and apply only to select shipments under investigation, the people said.

They show the lengths to which the U.S. has gone to enforce its chip export restrictions on China, even as the Trump administration has sought to relax some curbs on Chinese access to advanced American semiconductors.
The trackers can help build cases against people and companies who profit from violating U.S. export controls, said the people, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Location trackers are a decades-old investigative tool used by U.S. law enforcement agencies to track products subject to export restrictions, such as airplane parts. They have been used to combat the illegal diversion of semiconductors in recent years, one source said.

Five other people actively involved in the AI server supply chain say they are aware of the use of the trackers in shipments of servers from manufacturers such as Dell (DELL.N), opens new tab and Super Micro (SMCI.O), opens new tab, which include chips from Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab and AMD (AMD.O), opens new tab.
Those people said the trackers are typically hidden in the packaging of the server shipments. They did not know which parties were involved in installing them and where along the shipping route they were inserted.
Reuters was not able to determine how often the trackers have been used in chip-related investigations or when U.S. authorities started using them to investigate chip smuggling. The U.S. started restricting the sale of advanced chips by Nvidia, AMD and other manufacturers to China in 2022.
In one 2024 case described by two of the people involved in the server supply chain, a shipment of Dell servers with Nvidia chips included both large trackers on the shipping boxes and smaller, more discreet devices hidden inside the packaging — and even within the servers themselves.
A third person said they had seen images and videos of trackers being removed by other chip resellers from Dell and Super Micro servers. The person said some of the larger trackers were roughly the size of a smartphone.
The U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security, which oversees export controls and enforcement, is typically involved, and Homeland Security Investigations and the Federal Bureau of Investigation may take part too, said the sources.
The HSI and FBI both declined to comment. The Commerce Department did not respond to requests for comment.
The Chinese foreign ministry said it was not aware of the matter.
Super Micro said in a statement that it does not disclose its “security practices and policies in place to protect our worldwide operations, partners, and customers.” It declined to comment on any tracking actions by U.S. authorities.

The critical bug that could lead to a remote attack via voice call is one of 26 vulnerabilities affecting hundreds of Qualcomm chipsets.

Qualcomm has disclosed details about three high-severity security vulnerabilities that were exploited in limited, targeted attacks in October 2023.

During our security research we found that smart phones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm. This data is sent without user consent, unencrypted, and even when using a Google-free Android distribution. This is possible because the Qualcomm chipset itself sends the data, circumventing any potential Android operating system setting and protection mechanisms. Affected smart phones are Sony Xperia XA2 and likely the Fairphone and many more Android phones which use popular Qualcomm chips.

MIT CSAIL boffins devise PACMAN attack to let existing exploits avoid pointer authentication