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Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
- Chinese spies were able to add a small, undocumented chip to data servers sold to the US government and big tech companies, according to a blockbuster investigation by Bloomberg.
- The data servers were sold by San Jose-based Supermicro.
- Supermicro's stock lost more than half its value on Thursday.
On Thursday, Bloomberg published a blockbuster story alleging that Chinese spies were able to plant tiny microchips in data servers bought by American tech giants including Amazon and Apple.
Using these microchips, the goal of the Chinese spies was reportedly to gain access to sensitive corporate data and other secrets through advanced hacking.
According to the report, the tiny chips were implanted in server motherboards purchased from Super Micro Computer, a publicly-traded San Jose company that was described as the "Microsoft of the hardware world."
Many more details are available in Bloomberg's report.
Now, Supermicro's stock is plunging. It dropped over 53% on Thursday to $9.95 a share, losing over half of what its value was at the end of Wednesday.
Here's what the stock price looks like over the past week:
Markets Insider
All companies involved in the story, including Supermicro, strongly deny the Bloomberg report.
"While we would cooperate with any government investigation, we are not aware of any investigation regarding this topic nor have we been contacted by any government agency in this regard," Supermicro said in a statement. "We are not aware of any customer dropping Supermicro as a supplier for this type of issue."
"It's untrue that AWS knew about a supply chain compromise, an issue with malicious chips, or hardware modifications when acquiring Elemental," Amazon said in a statement.
"On this we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips, "hardware manipulations" or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server," Apple said in a statement. "Apple never had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident."
Apple and Amazon stock were both down over 1% at the time of publication.