Google software engineer accused of stealing AI technology for China
A federal grand jury returned an indictment Tuesday charging 38-year-old Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, with seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets.
Google, which is headquartered in Mountain View, hired Ding as a software engineer in 2019. Between 2022 and 2023, Ding uploaded more than 1,000 files containing confidential information from Google's network to his personal Google Cloud account, according to the indictment.
'While Ding was employed by Google, he secretly affiliated himself with two People's Republic of China (PRC)-based technology companies,' the U.S. Attorney's Office Northern District of California wrote. By mid-2023, Ding had founded his own technology company focused on AI and machine learning in China and was acting as the company's CEO, according to investigators.
'Ding intended to benefit the PRC government by stealing trade secrets from Google,' prosecutors wrote.
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China sponsors talent programs incentivized people to engaged in research and development outside the PRC to transmit that knowledge and research back in exchange for salaries, research funds, lab space, or other incentives, according to federal investigators.
Ding is accused of stealing technology from Google relating to:
The hardware infrastructure and software platform that allows Google's supercomputing data center to train and serve large AI models.
Trade secrets about the architecture and functionality of Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips and systems and Google's Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) systems, the software that allows the chips to communicate and execute tasks, and the software that orchestrates thousands of chips into a supercomputer capable of training and executing cutting-edge AI workloads.
Trade secrets on Google's custom-designed SmartNIC, a type of network interface card used to enhance Google's GPU, high performance, and cloud networking products.
The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Casey Boome and Molly Priedeman, as well as trial attorneys Stephen Marzen and Yifei Zheng of the National Security Division's Counterintelligence and Export Control Section.
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