Linwei Ding, an engineer at Google, has been indicted by a US federal grand jury for allegedly stealing trade secrets around the company’s AI chip software and hardware.
Ding was indicted on 5 March and subsequently arrested on Wednesday morning in Newark California.

Announcing the indictment and arrest, deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco said that Ding “stole from Google over 500 confidential files containing AI trade secrets while covertly working for China-based companies seeking an edge in the AI technology race.”

The stolen data is said to surround the Google tensor processing unit (TPU) chips, with software designs for both the v4 and v6 TPU chips, along with hardware and software specifications for GPUs used in Google’s data centre.

The indictment also says that Ding stole designs for Google’s machine learning workloads in data centres.

Ding stands accused of transferring these files to a personal Google Cloud account over a period of 12 months between May 2022 and May 2023. He did so “by copying data from the Google source files into the Apple Notes application on his Google-issued MacBook laptop,” and then converting the files from Apple Notes to PDFs to avoid detection.

The indictment goes on to claim that Chinese machine learning firm Rongshu offered to make Ding its chief technology officer less than a month after he began stealing files, and that the engineer went to China to raise funds for the company for a period of five months and led a startup called Zhisuan in the country while still working for Google.

Ding resigned from Google in December 2023, the same month he allegedly faked being present at the US office by having a colleague scan his badge at the door while he was in China.

The engineer faces four counts of theft of trade secrets, with each count potentially leading to up to ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

In a statement to The Verge, a spokesperson for Google said: “We have strict safeguards to prevent the theft of our confidential commercial information and trade secrets. After an investigation, we found that this employee stole numerous documents, and we quickly referred the case to law enforcement.

“We are grateful to the FBI for helping protect our information and will continue cooperating with them closely.”

---