Google engineer convicted of stealing AI hardware secrets

A former Google software engineer has been convicted in the US of stealing sensitive AI hardware secrets and using them to support two China-based technology startups, one of which he founded.

Linwei Leon Ding was found guilty on Thursday of seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of trade secret theft. Prosecutors said Ding stole confidential information linked to Google’s Tensor Processing Units, Graphics Processing Units and SmartNIC networking technology while working at the company.

Ding joined Google in May 2019 as a software engineer focused on improving GPU performance for machine learning systems used by Google and Google Cloud. In that role, he had access to proprietary technical data protected by the company’s internal security controls.

During the same period, Ding was approached by the CEO of a Beijing-based startup that focused on machine learning acceleration and was offered a high-ranking position in the company with a lucrative package. He later visited China, attended investor meetings, and by mid-2023, started his own company, Shanghai Zhisuan Technology Co., of which he became the CEO.

Prosecutors said internal company documents and investor pitches showed that Zhisuan planned to replicate and enhance large-scale computing platforms similar to those used by Google, with the intention of marketing the technology to organisations linked to the Chinese state, including government agencies and academic institutions.

Google became more suspicious in late 2023 after Ding uploaded additional files to another personal cloud account while in China. Shortly afterwards, company investigators discovered that Ding had appeared publicly as the head of his startup, despite still being employed by Google. His access was suspended, his work devices were seized, and the FBI later executed a search warrant.

The defence claimed that the prosecution had failed to prove that Ding directly delivered secrets to the Chinese government or on its behalf. However, the judge states that there was enough evidence for trial, and the jury unanimously found Ding guilty of all charges.

The US Justice Department stated that the evidence available indicated that Ding had intended to benefit entities controlled by the Chinese government by helping to build the infrastructure for AI and developing custom machine learning chips.

Ding could now face a maximum sentence of 10 years for each charge of trade secret theft and 15 years for each charge of economic espionage, depending on the federal sentencing guidelines.