A former Google software engineer has been charged in California with stealing artificial intelligence-related trade secrets from an Alphabet unit for the benefit of two Chinese companies for which he secretly worked.
Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, was indicted by a federal jury in San Francisco on Tuesday on four counts of theft of trade secrets.
A 38-year-old Chinese man was arrested Wednesday morning at his home in Newark, California. His attorney could not immediately be reached.
Ding’s indictment came just over a year after the Biden administration created an interagency strike force on disruptive technologies to help stop countries like China and Russia from acquiring advanced technologies or potentially endangering national security.
“The Department of Justice simply will not tolerate the theft of our trade secrets and intelligence,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a conference in San Francisco.
According to the indictment, Ding stole detailed information about the hardware infrastructure and software platform that enables Google’s supercomputer data centers to train large artificial intelligence models using machine learning.
The stolen information included details of the chips and systems and software that help power the supercomputer “capable of operating at the cutting edge of machine learning and AI technology,” the indictment said.
Google designed some of the allegedly stolen chip designs to gain an edge over cloud computing rivals Amazon.com and Microsoft, which are designing their own, and to reduce its reliance on Nvidia chips.
Ding, who was hired by Google in 2019, allegedly began the thefts three years later when he was set to become chief technology officer for the Chinese tech start-up, uploading more than 500 confidential files by May 2023.
The indictment said Ding started his own technology company that month and circulated a document to a chat group that said, “We have experience with Google’s 10,000-card computing power platform, we just need to replicate and upgrade it.”
Google became suspicious of Ding in December 2023 and seized his laptop on January 4, 2024, the day before Ding planned to resign.
Jose Castaneda, a Google spokesperson, said: “We have strict safeguards in place to prevent the theft of our confidential business information and trade secrets. After an investigation, we discovered that this employee had stolen a number of documents, and we quickly turned the case over to law enforcement.” “
