BEIJING—Escalating the international chip standoff into a new era of mutual suspicion, Chinese authorities announced this week that they have launched a full-scale cybersecurity investigation into Micron Technology, expressing fears the American company’s memory chips may secretly be transmitting Western snack-themed wisdom back to Silicon Valley.

According to the Chinese Ministry of Digital Paranoia, the probe will focus on determining whether Micron’s 232-layer NAND chips are harboring embedded messages such as “You will meet a mysterious stranger in the cloud” and “A firewall is only as strong as its weakest panda.”

“We have reliable reports that plugging in Micron hardware sometimes causes a faint, crackling voice to whisper ‘Democracy wins in the end,'” said Lead Inspector Hu Jintao, who admitted that repeated inspections have so far only uncovered files named ‘not_a_backdoor.exe.’ “Still, better safe than sorry. Next we will taste one.”

Micron spokesperson Chip R. Feldman denied all allegations, calling them “crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, and completely baseless.”

“We do not, nor have we ever, shipped fortune cookies or fortunes of any kind with our DRAM modules,” Feldman insisted, before accidentally dropping a slip of paper that read, “The next quarter will bring massive opportunities overseas.”

International observers say this investigation is just the latest round in the ongoing tech cold war. “First it was TikTok, now it’s snackable semiconductors,” commented Linda Yang, Senior Analyst at Chips Ahoy Institute. “If you listen closely, every chip is just chanting ‘geopolitics’ in binary.”