Overview
- A federal jury found Linwei (Leon) Ding guilty on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets.
- Prosecutors said he took more than 2,000 pages of confidential material between May 2022 and April 2023 and uploaded them to a personal Google Cloud account.
- Trial exhibits showed he copied files into Apple Notes, converted them to PDFs, and uploaded them to evade data-loss controls, and he let a colleague badge in to make it appear he was in the U.S. while he was in China.
- The stolen material included details on Google’s TPUs, GPU machines and cluster orchestration, and proprietary SmartNIC hardware and software used in AI data centers.
- DOJ and FBI leaders praised the conviction as protecting critical technology, and Ding faces up to 15 years per economic espionage count and up to 10 years per trade-secret theft count, with sentencing to follow.