From the documents published by the New York Times it seems that the NSA have introduced backdoors into VPN and SSL hardware crypto chips. There aren't that many major vendors who make such chips and undoubtedly people are going to be trying to find them now.

The question is what's going to happen when the vendors are identified ? - I can't imagine it'll be good for their customer base or their share-price.

Imagine you're a bank using vendor X's backdoored SSL acceleration. Say you're involved in a lawsuit where a customer claims they didn't authorise a transaction, now the customer can point to the fact that you're knowingly using hardware which has backdoor which would have allowed a third party to silently steal the users credentials.

This is a huge deal.