A U.S. federal jury has convicted Linwei Ding, a former software engineer at Google, for stealing AI supercomputer data from his employer and secretly sharing it with Chinese tech firms.
Ding was originally indicted in March 2024 after he lied and didn’t sincerely cooperate with Google’s internal investigation, leading to his arrest in California.
According to the prosecutors, between May 2022 and April 2023, Ding stole over 2,000 pages of confidential AI-related materials from Google and uploaded them to his personal Google Cloud account.
The stolen files contained key information about Google’s AI super-computing infrastructure, proprietary TPU and GPU system technologies, orchestration software for large-scale AI workloads, and SmartNIC networking technology.
Ding, who started at Google in 2019, was also secretly affiliated with two China-based technology companies and even negotiated a role as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at one of them.
Later, he founded his own AI company in China (Shanghai Zhisuan Technology Co.), serving as its CEO, and told potential investors he could build AI supercomputing infrastructure similar to Google’s.
Evidence showed that Ding sought to aid entities linked to the People’s Republic of China, applied to a Shanghai government-sponsored talent program, and stated his goal was to help China reach international-level computing infrastructure capabilities.
“The jury heard evidence pertaining to the PRC government’s establishment of talent plans to encourage individuals to come to China to contribute to the PRC’s economic and technological growth,” mentions the U.S. DoJ announcement.
“Ding’s application for this talent plan stated that he planned to ‘help China to have computing power infrastructure capabilities that are on par with the international level.’”
“The evidence at trial also showed that Ding intended to benefit two entities controlled by the government of China by assisting with the development of an AI supercomputer and collaborating on the research and development of custom machine learning chips.”
Ding never informed Google about his affiliations with the mentioned firms or disclosed his travels to China, even asking a colleague to periodically scan his entrance badge at his workplace to make it appear as if he was still in the U.S., working.
Following an 11-day trial in San Francisco, Ding was convicted on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of trade secret theft, each carrying a maximum imprisonment sentence of 10-15 years. However, no sentences have been announced yet.
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