Ex-Google Employee Charged With Stealing AI Trade Secrets, Faces 175 Years in Jail

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 models and applications they supported.”

By May 2023 Ding had founded an AI and machine learning company in China, made himself the CEO and shared PowerPoint presentations claiming that the firm, “will help China to have computing power infrastructure capabilities that are on par with the international level.”

After Google searched security camera records, it found another employee using Ding’s card to periodically scan into his office. That person claimed to have been asked to do this while Ding was in China, and wanted to appear to still be working at Google.

According to the DOJ, details about Google’s SmartNIC, Tensor Processing Unit and Graphics Processing Unit chips were all stolen, while Ding is accused of leaking software built for next-gen AI innovations.

The court documents state that the trade secrets “contain detailed information about the architecture and functionality of TPU chips and systems and GPU systems, the software that allowed the chips to communicate and execute tasks, and the software that orchestrated thousands of chips into a supercomputer capable of training and executing cutting-edge AI workloads.”

Each charge of economic espionage carries a maximum prison term of 15 years and a $5 million fine, while each trade secrets charge carries a maximum 10-year term and $250,000 fine—meaning that if found guilty, Ding could face up to 175 years of imprisonment and fines of up to $36.75 million.