Operatives from a unit of the Chinese People's Liberation Army allegedly worked in a factory assembling servers for SuperMicro Ltd in order to plant tiny chips into the hardware, reports Bloomberg. SuperMicro, one of the world's biggest suppliers of server motherboards, was assembling hardware for a startup called Elemental Technologies (whose servers can be found in the Defence Department, the CIA's drone operations and on US warships) when Elemental undertook a deep security check of the hardware and found the tiny malicious chips. Bloomberg says investigators found almost 30 US companies were affected including Apple and an un-named "major bank". A government official said China's goal was long-term access to high value corporate secrets and sensitive government networks.