Former Google software engineer Linwei Ding was convicted by a federal jury in San Francisco on Thursday of stealing AI trade secrets from the American technology giant to benefit two Chinese companies he secretly worked for, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) said on Thursday.
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 for stealing thousands of pages of confidential information.
Each economic espionage charge carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison and a $5 million fine, while each trade secrets charge carries a maximum penalty of 10 years and a $250,000 fine.
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Ding is scheduled to appear at a preliminary hearing on February 3, according to the DOJ.
Ding’s lawyer, also known as Leon Ding, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ding was initially indicted in March 2024 on four counts of theft of trade secrets. A superseding indictment in February expanded the charges.
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Ding’s case was coordinated by an interagency task force called the Disruptive Technology Strike Force, created in 2023 by the Biden administration.
Prosecutors said Ding stole information about the hardware infrastructure and software platform that allows Google’s supercomputing data centers to train large AI models.
Some of the allegedly stolen chip designs were intended to give Alphabet-owned Google an advantage over its cloud computing rivals Amazon.com and Microsoft, which design their own chips, and reduce Google’s dependence on Nvidia chips.
Prosecutors said Ding joined Google in May 2019 and began his robberies three years later when he was being courted to join an early-stage Chinese technology company.
Google was not charged and said it cooperated with law enforcement authorities. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
