A former Google engineer accused of stealing thousands of the company’s confidential documents to build a startup in China has been convicted in the U.S., the Department of Justice (DoJ) announced Thursday.
Linwei Ding (aka Leon Ding), 38, was convicted by a federal jury on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets for taking over 2,000 documents containing the tech giant’s trade secrets related to artificial intelligence (AI) technology for the benefit of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
“Silicon Valley is at the forefront of artificial intelligence innovation, pioneering transformative work that drives economic growth and strengthens our national security,” said U.S. Attorney Craig H. Missakian. “We will vigorously protect American intellectual capital from foreign interests that seek to gain an unfair competitive advantage while putting our national security at risk.”
Ding was indicted in March 2024 for transferring sensitive proprietary information from Google’s network to his personal Google Cloud account. The stolen documents included details about the company’s supercomputing data center infrastructure used for running AI models, the Cluster Management System (CMS) software for managing the data centers, and the AI models and applications they supported.
Specifically, the trade secrets pertained to –
- Architecture and functionality of Google’s custom Tensor Processing Unit chips and systems, and Google’s Graphics Processing Unit systems
- Software that allows the chips to communicate and execute tasks
- Software that orchestrates thousands of chips into a supercomputer capable of training and executing cutting-edge AI workloads
- Custom-designed SmartNIC, a type of network interface card used to facilitate high-speed communication within Google’s AI supercomputers and cloud networking products
The theft took place between May 2022 and April 2023. Ding, who joined Google in 2019, is said to have affiliated himself with two tech companies based in China, including a startup named Shanghai Zhisuan Technologies Co., which he founded in 2023, while he was employed by the firm. Ding downloaded the documents to his computer in December 2023, less than two weeks before resigning from Google.
“Around June 2022, Ding was in discussions to be the Chief Technology Officer for an early-stage technology company based in the PRC; by early 2023, Ding was in the process of founding his own technology company in the PRC focused on AI and machine learning and was acting as the company’s CEO,” the DoJ said.
The 2024 incident also alleged that the defendant took a number of deceitful steps to cover up the theft of trade secrets, including copying the data from Google source files into the Apple Notes application on his company-provided MacBook and then converting the notes to PDF files before uploading them to his Google account.
Furthermore, prosecutors accused Ding of asking another Google employee to use his company-issued access badge to scan into the entrance of a Google building, and give the impression that he was working from the office when, in fact, he was in China. The scheme unravelled in late 2023 when Google learned that he had given a public presentation in China to potential investors about his startup.
According to Courthouse News, Ding’s attorney Grant Fondo reportedly argued that Google did not do enough to protect the information, and that they could not have contained trade secrets because the documents in question were available to thousands of employees. “Google chose openness over security,” Fonda said.
In February 2025, Ding was charged with economic espionage, with the superseding indictment also claiming he applied to a Shanghai-based “talent” sponsored by Beijing. The indictment also called out these talent programs for encouraging individuals engaged in research and development outside the country to come to China to contribute to the nation’s economic and technological growth.
“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 DoJ said. “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 is scheduled to appear at a status conference on February 3, 2026. He faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for each count of theft of trade secrets and 15 years in prison for each economic espionage count.
