A former Google software engineer has been convicted by a federal jury in San Francisco of stealing artificial intelligence trade secrets from the U.S. technology giant to benefit Chinese companies he was secretly working for, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Thursday.
Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, a 38-year-old Chinese national, was found guilty after an 11-day trial on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets. Prosecutors said Ding stole thousands of pages of confidential information related to Google’s advanced AI infrastructure.
Each economic espionage charge carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison and a $5 million fine, while each trade secret theft charge carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Ding is scheduled to appear at a status conference on February 3, according to the Justice Department.
An attorney for Ding did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ding was initially indicted in March 2024 on four counts of trade secret theft, with prosecutors later expanding the case in a superseding indictment filed in February. The investigation was coordinated through the Biden administration’s Disruptive Technology Strike Force, an interagency initiative launched in 2023 to counter foreign theft of sensitive technologies.
According to prosecutors, Ding stole proprietary information about the hardware infrastructure and software platforms used by Google’s supercomputing data centers to train large-scale AI models. Some of the stolen materials included chip design blueprints intended to give Google an advantage over cloud computing rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft, while reducing reliance on Nvidia-manufactured chips.
Ding joined Google in May 2019 and allegedly began stealing confidential information around three years later, as he was being recruited by an early-stage Chinese technology company, prosecutors said.
Google, which is owned by Alphabet, was not charged in the case and has stated that it cooperated fully with law enforcement. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The conviction underscores growing U.S. concerns over economic espionage and the protection of sensitive AI technologies amid rising geopolitical tensions with China.
