Not to mention, if this hardware had been trying to phone home, it's safe to assume it would have set off some kind of an alert at at least one of these places.
"...let us consider a hypothetical. What if: 1. Everything in the Businessweek story is true, Chinese spies planted hardware backdoors in computers built and used by major American companies, and the FBI investigated along with those companies and discovered the backdoors. 2. It is a national-security secret and the companies were instructed by the FBI never to acknowledge it. 3. The companies are patriotically but falsely denying the hack."
But no, they went thermonuclear on the denial.
“In 2016, Apple informed Supermicro that it was severing their relationship entirely—a decision a spokesman for Apple ascribed in response to Businessweek’s questions to an unrelated and relatively minor security incident.”
Maybe at some big companies, but not anywhere I've worked. I hardly know anyone who audits outgoing traffic with dedicated hardware.
I wonder if there is some magical market cap boundary beyond which companies stop being grossly negligent. We know it's over 200B as Intel somehow never bothered fixing their products for decades, let's hope five times that is big enough.