I'm not saying they can't do anything with a three pin chip, just that this was pretty short on tech details. That's (probably) not the kind of chip you'd be using to parse network traffic on a 10G link and upload secrets. Maybe a key logger, but I don't imagine apple or amazon having a keyboard plugged into very many of their servers.

If they had come out and said, this is what this chip does, this is how it interacts with the rest of the board, or it phones home to x.y.z or something, I'd be a lot more convinced. As it is, the technical evidence is a little light as are the sources. So I think I'll hold on conclusions until we get some more info about what they think the chip was doing.