Super Micro Shares Plunge 25% After Co-Founder Charged in $2.5B Smuggling Plot

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2026/03/20/super-micro-shares-plunge-25-after-co-founder-charged-in-25-billion-ai-chip-smuggling-plot/

109•pera•2h ago

Comments

alephnerd•1h ago

Oof. SuperMicro also had it's hardware supply chain compromised back in the 2010s [0][1][2][3]

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-supermicro/

[2] - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/02/chinese-suppl...

[3] - https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-severed-ties-w...

progbits•1h ago

Those claims were never confirmed, no? Some of it might be true or trueish but I'm not talking Bloomberg's anonymous sources word for it, and with so much supermicro gear out there you would think some other evidence would show up.

alephnerd•1h ago

A supply chain attack similar to Supermicro's would be much more targeted and recalls with national security implications do get flagged via a separate chain.

protimewaster•1h ago

It depends on what you consider confirmed. It was kind of corroborated, at least. There was a CEO of a hardware security firm that came forward after the original article. He claimed that his firm had actually found a hardware implant on a board during a security audit. It wasn't exactly as Bloomberg described, though.

His take was that it was very unlikely that it impacted exclusively Supermicro, though.

It was covered various places, including The Register https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/09/bloomberg_super_micro...

kantselovich•54m ago

I don't think it was a confirmed story. That is, the tiny "grain of rice" size Ethernet module that CEO of a security audit company allegedly found, was not present in other SuperMicro servers. SuperMicro itself, as well as it's buggest customers did not confirm the findings.

From what i recall, the story was very vague, there were no pictures of the specific chip, no pictures of the motherboard of the motherboard that would include serial, i.e. no details that would accompany a serious security research.

throwa356262•1h ago

Didn't that turn out to be incorrect?

Multiple security companies looked into this and found nothing malicious.

alephnerd•1h ago

Nope. Bloomberg doubled down on it and even Bruce Schneider accepted it despite initially being a skeptic.

tumult•1h ago

No evidence was ever presented and nobody ever found anything, as far as I can tell?

protimewaster•1h ago

There was a security auditing firm that came out a few days later claiming they'd found a chip, similar to the one Bloomberg described, during a security audit.

It's still nothing concrete, though. Their CEO basically said that they'd found one and that they couldn't say much more about it due to an NDA.

protimewaster•1h ago

There also was a CEO of a hardware security company that came out and said that his firm had found an implanted chip during an audit. IIRC, he was convinced that it was very unlikely to be limited to Supermicro hardware.

alephnerd•1h ago

> he was convinced that it was very unlikely to be limited to Supermicro hardware

Yep. This was why there was a significant movement around mandating Hardware BOMs in both US and EU procurement in the early 2020s.

Also, the time period that the Bloomberg story took place was the late 2000s and early 2010s, when hardware supply chain security was much less mature.

unsnap_biceps•1h ago

I don't believe that there was ever extra chips being added to the boards, but what I could believe is that they shipped with firmware on specific chips that enabled data exfiltration for specific customers and due to a game of telephone with non technical people it turned into "they're adding chips inside the pcb layers!"

greedo•1h ago

Schneier was simply taking at face value the contents of the Bloomberg article, especially the statement by Mike Quinn who claimed he was told by the Air Force not to include any Supermicro gear in a bid.

frenchtoast8•1h ago

Bloomberg's claims sound like science fiction: https://www.servethehome.com/investigating-implausible-bloom...

Bloomberg's tech coverage is not great from what I've seen. Last year they published a video which was intended to investigate GPUs being smuggled into China, but they couldn't get access to a data center so they basically said we don't know if it's true or not. Meanwhile an independent Youtuber with a fraction of the resources actually met and filmed the smugglers and the middlemen brokering the sales between them and the data centers. Bloomberg responded by filing a DMCA takedown of that video.

timschmidt•26m ago

What Bloomberg proposed - sniffing the TTL signal between BMC and boot ROM and flipping a few bits in transit - is far from science fiction. It would be easy to implement in the smallest of microcontrollers using just a few lines of code: a ring buffer to store the last N bits observed, and a trigger for output upon observing the desired bits. 256 bytes of ROM would probably be plenty. Appropriately tiny microcontrollers can also power themselves parasitically from the signal voltage as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Wire chips do.

Something similar has been done in many video game console mod chips. IIRC, some of the mod chips manage it on an encrypted bus (which Bloomberg's claims do not require).

fidotron•35m ago

From thousands of miles away you can hear the fans at the NSA data center as they spin up checking the background to all responses to this posting.

nebula8804•17m ago

I'd like to think that modern centers are water cooled so it'd be more quiet these days unless you are implying that this application of theirs is running on legacy hardware? :P

vicchenai•1h ago

The timing is brutal - SMCI already had the accounting restatement scandal in 2024, spent months fighting delisting, finally got somewhat rehabilitated in the AI infrastructure boom... and now this. 25% single-day drop on a company that was already trading at a discount to peers tells you the market was still pricing in tail risk. For anyone tracking institutional holdings - the 13F filings from Q4 showed several funds adding back SMCI after the accounting mess cleared up. Those bets just got very painful.

dwa3592•1h ago

https://substack.com/home/post/p-191531928

evanjrowley•56m ago

It's sad to see what's happened to SuperMicro. They were one of the few vendors of server-grade hardware fitting standard ATX, mATX, and ITX form factors. In my experience their hardware was always better than the others who attempted to do the same (Gigabyte, Asus, ASRock). These days, motherboards with the features I want are going to be on AliExpress. Ironic considering this latest news is about putting trade barriers between the US and mainland China.

cobertos•25m ago

How do you even find motherboards on AliExpress properly? Do you have a methodology to split the chaff from the wheat?

segmondy•3m ago

what chaff? Just search, find what you want and buy. It's like ebay.

nebula8804•22m ago

You either become an Apple or you eventually circle the drain competing to zero margins which forces 'other methods' of generating growth.

int32_64•54m ago

Remember when Singapore buyers were an abnormally high percentage of nvidia's revenue? You have to wonder if these companies are this brazen because they know the DoJ will have political pressure not to nuke the bubble which is more important than being China hawks.

simonebrunozzi•54m ago

So, good time to buy on the panic?

czbond•43m ago

If you do, you could protect yourself with a sell stop below $17.25... because if it breaks that on weekly candles, next are $14 and $10. Or you could buy some calls instead when the volatility calms down. If you do it now, the volcrush could happen even if you're correct.

Not investment advice, do you own research. I'm just someone on the Internet.

stevewodil•15m ago

Thank you stock astrologist

simonw•50m ago

I'd been assuming that the Chinese AI labs producing excellent LLMs despite the NVIDIA export restrictions was due to them finding new optimizations for training against the hardware they had access to.

I wonder if any of those $2.5B of smuggled chips ended up being used for those training runs.

John23832•37m ago

The answer is, of course lol?

Gamers Nexus did a whole deep dive which basically proved that Chinese researchers had access to whatever they wanted.

https://youtu.be/1H3xQaf7BFI?si=ojlxOC7uiPqZxv0N

simonw•22m ago

Some of the big LLM labs have written about their training hardware.

DeepSeek v3 was trained on 2,048 NVIDIA H800s. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19437

MiniMax M1 used 512 H800s. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13585

The H800 wasn't banned in the first round of export controls - but was after October 2023: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/17/us-bans-export-of-more-ai-ch...

Z.ai say they used Huawei hardware: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/15/zhipu_glm_image_huawe...

Qwen and Kimi haven't disclosed their hardware as far as I can tell.

tyre•10m ago

If they were using banned chips they wouldn't declare them in public papers. There have been multiple documented/alleged cases of chips being routed through Singaporean shell companies.

For example: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

tcdent•22m ago

I'm kindof surprised by this take.

Did you think the hesitancy of westerners engaging and relying on Chinese labs was due to vibes? There are fundamental cultural differences at play, wether we are comfortable admitting that or not.

peyton•16m ago

Simon, love your work. Hope this is sarcasm. If not, imagine the opposite: Sam Altman and co suddenly started producing tons of content about how smart they are in Mandarin. Why do they even need a story to begin with, let alone one they push halfway around the world?

The $2.5B number is just these guys. It could be 10x in total.

Namahanna•34m ago

The Gamers Nexus GPU Blackmarket deep dive was great at digging into this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI

And the entire Bloomberg takedown drama added fire to the flames.

hangonhn•22m ago

Yeah what as the story behind the BBerg take down drama? I just remember it being something absurd.

ipsum2•8m ago

He used a clip from Bloomberg without permission.

Namahanna•3m ago

GN used Bloomberg clips of US Gov officials speaking on AI chip matters, fully under fair use.

And Bloomberg did a DMCA takedown through youtube, copystrike in parlance which pulled the video down for a week. GN had no recourse other than to wait and counterclaim.

Week timed out, Bloomberg did nothing but be the bully.

maxglute•28m ago

They need a new logo.

phendrenad2•25m ago

Maybe it's time to re-visit that "spy chip" story from almost a decade ago.

Edit: Officially-debunked, I should note

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