If it's real, it could be part of a bigger persistent threat. Maybe those chips would react to some signals, start to heat and fry the motherboard. In case of

If it's real, it could be part of a bigger persistent threat. Maybe those chips would react to some signals, start to heat and fry the motherboard. In case of military war, it could DoS many servers at once from the inside. It could also be used to prematurely break the motherboards, and sell new ones. There could just be there to ping C&C upon activation in order to locate datacenters, including military ones maybe (information that could be useful in that case of war too). We can think of a few use cases than just spying on network packets.