A Chinese national who used to work at Google has been found guilty of stealing IP from his former employer in order to launch a new venture in his home country.

Former software engineer Linwei Ding (aka Leon Ding), 38, was convicted by a US federal jury late last week on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets.

First indicted in March 2024, Ding was accused of stealing over 2000 pages of sensitive technical information from Google’s AI business and uploading them to a personal Google Cloud account.

He first copied data from Google source files into Apple Notes on his corporate MacBook. Ding then converted them into PDFs and uploaded them to the cloud storage account, in order to bypass the firm’s data loss prevention (DLP) checks.

Ding also allowed a colleague to use his badge to scan into a Google building, to make it appear he was working in the US when he was actually in China.

Read more on insider breaches: General Electric Insider Handed Two Years for IP Theft.

The IP was related to Google’s custom Tensor Processing Unit and GPU systems, and the software needed to orchestrate thousands of these chips in an AI supercomputer.

Separate trade secrets related to Google’s SmartNIC network interface card which supports high-speed communication in the firm’s AI supercomputers and cloud networking products.

Making Plans for China

Ding is said to have built links to two Chinese companies while working at Google. In June 2022 he was in discussions to be the CTO of an early-stage tech company in China, while by early 2023, he was acting as the CEO of his own start up, the Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement.

According to the DoJ, he applied for a government-sponsored talent plan designed to encourage the diaspora to return to China to enrich the country economically and technologically. Ding’s  application apparently mentioned a desire to “help China to have computing power infrastructure capabilities that are on par with the international level.”

Ding also intended to help develop an AI supercomputer and custom machine learning chips for at least two state-controlled entities in China.

A maximum sentence of 10 years in prison could be given to Ding for each count of theft of trade secrets and 15 years for each count of economic espionage.

China is not the only country keen to get its hands on AI secrets developed by US companies. Also in 2024, Meta launched legal action against a “brazenly disloyal” former VP of infrastructure who allegedly took sensitive documents with him to a new Kuwaiti-backed startup called Omniva.

A report from 2015 claimed the US is losing trillions of dollars each year due to Chinese IP theft.