It was more like, the mother board had 117 chips on it, and each of those chips had 3 suppliers for sub components for that chip... and a few commissioners, went to a few factory operators with some “slight modifications”. Sometimes they went along willingly, some were bribed or threatened into cooperation.  They modified the chips and the upstream people in the supply chain didn’t know and built the server.  The servers went into the data center.    I wasn’t clear as to how they egress the data though.  Is it sending it out later?  Do network traffic analyzers/sniffers not see the traffic, or for some reason misc outbound traffic to China from your servers didn’t trip an alarm?  Firewalls don’t get in the way?