If you are referring to Bloomberg's bombshell story about rogue chips installed on motherboards in China during assembly at the factory that then have compromised Apple and Amazon (referenced here: https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/bloombergs-bom...) than the far-fetched element is that it has been three years since the story came out and not a single element of physical evidence have been presented, when one would simply need a microscope to find them in devices. This after multiple major news organizations spent years trying to follow-up on the story and found no evidence whatsoever to back it up.

It was a game of telephone gone horribly wrong, and Bloomberg's reputation is shot since they have refused to retract it.

>when one would simply need a microscope to find them in devices

This isn't a true statement, if strictly read--there are many techniques to hide undocumented components on boards, and covering all of them requires more than just a pass under a SEM. There's a fun talk that goes over a lot of them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqQhWitJ1As

Bloomberg continues to build on this theory (same reporter AFAIK) even as recently as this year https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-supermicro/

That so many hidden/secret chips are being placed on mobos that we are suffering a global chip shortage because of it?

Do you really need it explained why that's far fetched? I'm going to let you think on that a bit longer. It should have kicked in by now.

I was referring to the Bloomberg article, you can turn off that incredulity-drive now.

The Heart of Gold has the improbability drive, while its sister ship the Heart of Silver has the incredulity drive. I like it. I hadn't heard that one before.