Amazon web service CEO Andy Jassy and Supermicro CEO Charles Liang Monday joined Apple CEO Tim Cook in urging Bloomberg to retract its story about alleged malicious chips planted in Silicon Valley-bound motherboards.
Jassy, who is in charge of Amazon Web Services (AWS), said in a tweet that Bloomberg's story provided no proof about the so-called spying chips embedded in the hardware during its manufacture in China.
Bloomberg Businessweek published a story earlier this month alleging about 30 U.S. companies were compromised after their servers were implanted malicious chips when they were made in China, which created "a stealth backdoor" into their network running on the servers.
The report alledged Apple and Amazon were among the victims.
However, Cook dismissed the Bloomberg story in a recent interview with BuzzFeed News, and demanded that the newspaper retract the unfounded story.
"There is no truth in their story about Apple," Cook said. "They need to do that right thing and retract it."
Jassy echoed Cook's views in a tweet on Monday.
"@tim_cook is right. Bloomberg story is wrong about Amazon, too. They offered no proof, story kept changing, and showed no interest in our answers unless we could validate their theories. Reporters got played or took liberties. Bloomberg should retract," Jassy said.
Supermicro, which is the manufacturer and supplier of the motherboards mentioned by Bloomberg in the report, has joined the chorus of Apple and other companies involved to reject all of Bloomberg's claims from the very beginning.
Supermicro CEO Liang said in a statement shared on social media on Monday that his company has found no illicit hardware components in its products, nor has Bloomberg produced an affected Supermicro motherboard.
"Bloomberg's recent story has created unwarranted confusion and concern for our customers, and has caused our customers, and us, harm," Liang said.
"Bloomberg has not produced a single affected motherboard, we have seen no malicious hardware components in our products, no government agency has contacted us about malicious hardware components, and no customer has reported finding any malicious hardware components, either," said the Supermicro CEO.
He noted that Bloomberg should act responsibly and retract its unsupported allegations that malicious hardware components were implanted on Supermicro motherboards during the manufacturing process in China.
