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In 10 years of covering Apple, I've never seen anything like this.

Bloomberg Businessweek has dropped a bombshell: Chinese intelligence — agents of the People’s Liberation Army — forced factories in China to add tiny spy chips to server boards being manufactured for industry-leading Super Micro, to be sold to industry giants like Apple and Amazon. Their boards and servers literally provide the hearts and minds for many of the world’s data centers, large and small. And, the report says, they’ve been hacked at the hardware level.

I’m an optimist. I like to believe Bloomberg would fact-check the hell out of all of this before printing world one. That they would have it cold. But I also like to believe no public company would risk refuting it this strong if they weren’t dead sure it was wrong.

The various accounts can’t be reconciled. There are no multiple truths here. Someone got it wrong under circumstances where getting it wrong is catastrophic.

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LINKS:

• The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies
• What Businessweek got wrong about Apple
• Setting the Record Straight on Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Erroneous Article
• Bloomberg’s ‘The Big Hack’

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