Bloomberg reports that Chinese operatives were able to insert malicious chips into motherboards made by Supermicro, which provided data center equipment for Amazon.com and Apple . The report says such hardware hacks are very difficult to accomplish but are “potentially more devastating, promising the kind of long-term, stealth access that spy agencies are willing to invest millions of dollars and many years to get.”

Amazon, Apple, Supermicro, and China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs all denied the report in lengthy statements posted by Bloomberg. Amazon said its AWS cloud-computing unit didn’t know about a supply-chain compromise when it acquired Elemental, a company that Bloomberg reported was found to have on its motherboards a microchip not part of the original design. Apple said it had conducted numerous internal investigations over the past year based on inquiries made by Bloomberg and “found absolutely no evidence to support any of them.”

Asked for additional comment, Apple pointed to its statement to Bloomberg. Amazon said it hasn’t found any issues related to modified hardware or malicious chips in Supermicro motherboards in any Elemental or Amazon systems, and hasn’t taken part in any government investigation. Supermicro didn’t immediately respond.

HP stock starts strong

On balance, Wall Street seems to like the message that came out of HP Inc. ’sanalyst day Wednesday. HP stock is up 3% in premarket trading after the company issued an earnings forecast of $2.12 to $2.22 a share for the 2019 fiscal year and discussed broader trends impacting the business.

Analysts took a more mixed view. Guggenheim’s Robert Cihra pointed to management’s projection for flat component costs, which he deemed potentially conservative amid recent NAND and DRAM pricing weakness. Cihra thinks that the high component prices of the past were strangely a good thing for HP, which was able to pass along those increases to consumers and drive device average selling prices higher. Cihra thinks HP faces a “headwind” in the 2019 fiscal year ending in October as it laps this past year’s ASP increases, but he notes that consolidation in the PC market could benefit industry pricing.

Cloudera and Hortonworks in the clouds

Cloudera stock and Hortonworks stock are both soaring after a merger announcement. The companies announced an all-stock deal late Wednesday through which Cloudera would acquire Hortonworks and Hortonworks would pay 1.305 shares per share of Cloudera. Both companies help with big data.

Both stocks were up by double-digit percentages in premarket trading, and the combination has won analyst praise. “The combined company will be able to offer a much broader set of products to its customer base that will span the data warehousing, machine learning, AI, and data management spaces,” wrote Stifel’s Brad Reback. He sees opportunities to cross-sell once the deal is completed.

An Internet reset

Evercore ISI analyst Anthony DiClemente did some maintenance of his models on Thursday, lowering his price targets on shares of eBay , Snap ,Facebook , and Twitter while raising his targets on shares of Amazon, AngiHomeservices, IAC/InterActiveCorp , Netflix , and Yelp . The changes come in anticipation of the companies’ earnings reports for the summer quarter.

Shares of Snap are down 4.5% premarket, while shares of Twitter andFacebook are down less than 1%. “While advertising-driven internet stocks have underperformed in recent months (namely FB, TWTR, and SNAP), we worry that regulatory concerns are unlikely to dissipate in the near term,” DiClemente wrote.

Not-so-distant memory

Cowen analyst Karl Ackerman is the latest to weigh in on trends in the memory market, including “the pervasiveness of softening” average selling prices in the industry. “Bigger picture, procurement costs will ease for upstream IT manufacturers, but elasticity of demand remains a powerful cocktail that argues for a more balanced [supply/demand] backdrop” in 2019, Ackerman said.

Ackerman views DRAM trends to be an “overall positive” for Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia . AMD is ramping its 14-nanometer and 12-nanometer technology and will eventually look to do a wide launch of its 7-nanometer CPUs. Nvidia, meanwhile, has new Turing graphics card for which “the attached DRAM is a sizable portion” of costs. Ackerman still sees “mixed messages” for Intel.