Former Google Engineer Charged With Stealing AI Trade Secrets For Chinese Company Profits

Illustration of Google AI. (photo: dock. google)

JAKARTA - Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, has been indicted in California on charges of stealing trade secrets related to artificial intelligence from Alphabet's unit, for the benefit of two Chinese companies he has been secretly helping.

In a federal hearing in San Francisco, the jury accused Linwei Ding, a 38-year-old Chinese national, of four counts of theft of trade secrets. He was arrested on Wednesday morning, March 6, at his home in feasibility, California.

According to the indictment, Ding stole detailed information about hardware infrastructure and software platforms that allow Google's supercomputation data centers to train large AI models through machine learning.

Google is allegedly designing some of the stolen chips to gain an advantage over cloud computing competitors such as Amazon and Microsoft, as well as reducing its dependence on chips from Nvidia.

Ding, who was recruited by Google in 2019, allegedly started stealing in 2022, when he was invited to become chief technology officer for Chinese technology companies. In May 2023, he has uploaded more than 500 confidential files.

The indictment states Ding founded his own company in the same month, and spreads documents to chat groups stating "We have experience with a computing power platform of ten thousand Google cards; we just need to replicate and improve it."

Google became suspicious of Ding in December 2023 and took his laptop on January 4, 2024, the day before Ding planned to resign.

Ding faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of 250,000 US dollars (Rp 3.9 billion) for every criminal charge.