No, there was no secret Chinese hardware implant

Super Micro has not moved on.

The San Jose-based motherboard manufacturer found itself mired in controversy after an Oct. 4 Bloomberg Businessweek article claimed, with a robust 17 sources allegedly backing up the story, that Chinese spies had managed to implant a chip on some of the company’s boards. Super Micro Computer Inc. denied the story, and ordered an independent investigation of the claims. According to Reuters, the results are in: Super Micro is in the clear.

In a letter sent to its customers, the company reportedly says the investigation found no evidence of Bloomberg’s claims.

“As we have stated repeatedly since these allegations were reported,” CNBC reports CEO Charles Liang as writing, “no government agency has ever informed us that it has found malicious hardware on our products; no customer has ever informed us that it found malicious hardware on our products; and we have never seen any evidence of malicious hardware on our products.”

The Bloomberg story has also been forcefully denied by Apple and Amazon. 

Super Micro stock fell roughly 40 percent following the publication of the Bloomberg piece, and has still not fully recovered. 

Reuters reports that the firm Nardello & Co. carried out the investigation on Super Micro’s behalf. The process allegedly included testing actual motherboards — both those currently being made and ones that had been sold to Amazon and Apple in the past. 

These findings will come as no surprise to Apple’s vice president of information security, George Stathakopoulos, who in October sent a letter to Congress stating that his company’s “internal investigations concluded [Bloomberg’s] claims were simply wrong.”

Notably, the Washington Post reported in late November that Bloomberg appeared to be quietly attempting to re-report its blockbuster story. 

This effort suggests Bloomberg has, possibly, begun to doubt its own original claims. Although, it should be added, whatever doubt may exist has yet to cause the publication to issue a correction or a retraction of the initial story.