Three senators asked President Trump in an Oct. 11 letter to provide information on whether the U.S. government operates any equipment using motherboards supplied by Super Micro Computer which was the subject of a recent article by Bloomberg Businessweek reporting that Super Micro equipment had chips secretly implanted in the equipment that enabled backdoor data transmissions to China. Super Micro has strongly denied the claims of that report. Sens. Edward Markey, D-Mass., Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., also asked what steps the U.S. has taken to ensure that Federal government equipment does not contain illicit chips, and whether the White House knows other instances of the Chinese government infiltrating technology made for end users in the U.S. They asked for a reply by Nov. 2.
