A former Google engineer faces up to 175 years in jail after being accused of stealing trade secrets in a U.S. Department of Justice indictment.
Linwei (Leon) Ding, 38, was charged by a federal grand jury in San Francisco with seven counts of economic espionage and a further seven counts of theft of trade secrets.
Ding, who was arrested in March 2024 and is currently under investigation by the FBI, is accused of having uploaded proprietary data on Google AI supercomputer hardware infrastructure and software to his personal account. The DOJ claims he was doing this to benefit Chinese firms and, ultimately, “the PRC government and instrumentalities.”
Ding had allegedly been in talks with the chief technology officer of a Chinese tech company since June 2022, and is accused of uploading more than 1,000 Google documents to his personal cloud account between May 2022 and 2023.
According to the DOJ: “Employee activity on Google’s network was logged, including file transfers to platforms such as Google Drive.” Ding allegedly uploaded the files to his personal Google Cloud account.
Ding’s role responsibilities, according to court documents, included “development of software that allowed GPUs to function efficiently for machine learning, AI applications…” He was authorized to “access Google Confidential Information related to Google’s supercomputing data centers, including the hardware infrastructure, the software platform, and the AI…
