Put your tin foil hats away. This doesn't "crack" NTLM, it brute forces at a very high rate. The NSA has more money to spend, but are similarly limited by the hardware available at any given point.
So they could have easily fabbed something like this, or a tuned architecture specifically designed for the purpose.
considering that the entire purpose of NSA in the first place is to provide SIGINT and encrypt or decrypt signals, it's almost a given that they're trying to the best of their ability to crack stuff.
Money buys more commodity hardware faster than the time/money used to develop a chip
It's not hard to make tens, or maybe even hundreds of GPUs beat a specialized chip except for very specific things
And even for something specialized it's probably easier to use an FPGA
Instead, they participate in a program to partner with domestic companies to manufacture their chips: http://trustedfoundryprogram.org/