Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Apple isn’t relenting in its attacks on last week’s Bloomberg story claiming that tiny Chinese chips had compromised the security of Apple and Amazon data centers. In a Monday letter to Congress, Apple wrote that the claims in the Bloomberg story were “simply wrong.”
Bloomberg’s story, published last Thursday, claimed that the Chinese government had secretly added spy chips to the motherboards of servers sold by Supermicro. According to Bloomberg, these servers wound up in the data centers of almost 30 companies, including Apple and Amazon. But the three companies featured in the story—Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro—have all issued broad and strongly worded denials.
The stakes here are high for Apple. Millions of Americans rely on the company to protect the privacy of their data on iCloud and other online services. If there were really Chinese chips infiltrating Apple data centers, it could call into question the security of those services. But Apple insists that the story was simply bogus.