The new global marketplace is rife with “American Made” items whose parts are produced elsewhere. Levi’s are mostly outsourced now. JanSport, the iconic label that’s a part of the American college experience, is produced mostly overseas. But in the world of tech, where consumers have started closely following the conditions at the Chinese manufactures where iPhones and iPads are made, stamping a sleek new gizmo with “Designed and Manufactured in the U.S.A.” is not only considered a “symbolic and significant” experiment signifying a shift in the overseas manufacturing of tech, it’s downright begging for scrutiny. Especially if it turns out many of the guts of the gadget in question were manufactured overseas.

Enter the Nexus Q, Google’s new entertainment orb.

Wired recently secured some high-resolution photos of its precision-engineered innards, which noted the U.S. origins of Google’s bold experiment in home hardware. But the images also revealed the tiny, obscure markings on some of the components used to make the Q tick–arcane groups of letters and numbers that don’t really mean much to anyone apart from the makers and electronics enthusiasts like the folks at iFixit. But they also reveal that parts of the Q, core elements of its circuitry, aren’t made in the U.S.A.

For example, there’s a tiny power transformer there stamped with a “WE” logo. That’s the mark of German firm Wurth Elektronik, a Wurth spokesperson confirms to Fast Company: “There is a Wurth Electronics Midcom transformer on the device (part number 75012548) and also a common mode choke (744821110).” While these bits of tech aren’t super-clever, they’re vital to making the Q function and they actually come from a German firm. “The transformer,” the Wurth spokesperson pointed out, “is produced at our factory in China.”

Meanwhile the Q’s neat NFC capability is delivered by a chip stamped “NXP 44501.” That’s the mark of NXP, a semiconductor firm based in the Netherlands, and which was actually spun out of the well-known Philips company some while ago. The chip seems to be a relabeled version of NXP’s PN544 device, which was championed as the “world’s first industry standard chip” for NFC back in 2009 and which is used in many devices like the Nexus S and Nokia C7.

Another chip on the Nexus Q’s board is labeled “TXC,” and would seem to be a quartz timing chip from makers TXC–who just reported some promising sales projections, driven by the explosion in consumer electronics like the Nexus Q. TXC is headquartered in Taipei.