U.S. Charges Ex-Google Engineer With Espionage To Aid China’s AI

A former Google software engineer is facing charges of economic espionage, with U.S. prosecutors alleging he stole trade secrets to support China’s artificial intelligence industry, as first reported by Bloomberg.

Linwei Ding, a Chinese national who worked at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, was initially indicted in March. On Tuesday, the U.S. Justice Department announced a revised indictment, adding seven counts of economic espionage to the existing seven counts of trade secret theft, as reported by Bloomberg.

Ding, who also goes by Leon Ding, allegedly misappropriated information about Google’s custom-designed chips, which are used to train AI models like Gemini.

According to the indictment, Ding allegedly uploaded over 1,000 confidential Google files to his personal cloud account, prosecutors say. Specifically, the stolen trade secrets included details on Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) architectures, crucial for AI supercomputing.

The indictment states that he took these sensitive data while working at the company and later founded a startup in China in 2023. Prosecutors also claim he applied to a Shanghai-based talent program that incentivizes individuals to bring foreign technical knowledge back to China.

In his application, Ding reportedly described his product as one that “will help China to have computing power infrastructure capabilities that are on par with the international level,” as reported by Bloomberg.

U.S. authorities allege that an internal memo from his startup detailed plans to provide products and services to Chinese state agencies and universities.

The case comes amid broader tensions over economic espionage between the U.S. and China. Just last week, a former senior adviser to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was arrested for allegedly conspiring to steal government trade secrets for China, noted Bloomberg.

If convicted, Ding faces up to 15 years in prison per count of economic espionage and 10 years per trade secret theft charge. His legal team has not yet commented, said Bloomberg.