Ex-Google Engineer Convicted for Stealing 2,000 AI Trade Secrets for China Startup

Ravie LakshmananJan 30, 2026Artificial Intelligence / Economic Espionage

A former Google engineer accused of stealing thousands of the company’s confidential documents to build a startup in China has been convicted in the U.S., the Department of Justice (DoJ) announced Thursday.

Linwei Ding (aka Leon Ding), 38, was convicted by a federal jury on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets for taking over 2,000 documents containing the tech giant’s trade secrets related to artificial intelligence (AI) technology for the benefit of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

“Silicon Valley is at the forefront of artificial intelligence innovation, pioneering transformative work that drives economic growth and strengthens our national security,” said U.S. Attorney Craig H. Missakian. “We will vigorously protect American intellectual capital from foreign interests that seek to gain an unfair competitive advantage while putting our national security at risk.”

Ding was indicted in March 2024 for transferring sensitive proprietary information from Google’s network to his personal Google Cloud account. The stolen documents included details about the company’s supercomputing data center infrastructure used for running AI models, the Cluster Management System (CMS) software for managing the data centers, and the AI models and applications they supported.

Specifically, the trade secrets pertained to –

Architecture and functionality of Google’s custom Tensor Processing Unit chips and systems, and Google’s Graphics Processing Unit systems
Software that allows the chips to communicate and execute tasks
Software that orchestrates thousands of chips into a supercomputer capable of training and executing cutting-edge AI workloads
Custom-designed SmartNIC, a type of network interface card used to facilitate high-speed communication within Google’s AI supercomputers and cloud networking products

The theft took place between May 2022 and…

Source