A federal jury in San Francisco has convicted former Google software engineer Ding Linwei of stealing confidential information about Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) computing systems and using it to support China-based ventures.
Ding, 38, was found guilty on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets following an 11-day trial, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced on Thursday. Prosecutors said the stolen information detailed how Google designs, builds, and operates the supercomputing data centers used to train and run large AI models.
“The theft and misuse of advanced artificial intelligence technology for the benefit of the People’s Republic of China threatens our technological edge and economic competitiveness,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Sanjay Virmani said in the Jan. 29 press release.
U.S. Attorney Craig H. Missakian said in the same news release that the verdict shows “the theft of this valuable technology will not go unpunished.”
Court filings show that Ding began secretly copying Google’s proprietary materials in May 2022 and continued through May 2023, uploading more than 1,000 unique files to a personal cloud storage account.
The superseding indictment outlines a method prosecutors say was designed to avoid detection. Ding allegedly copied information from Google source files into Apple Notes on his work laptop, converted those notes into PDFs, and then uploaded them outside Google’s internal network.
Prosecutors linked that activity to Ding’s growing involvement with two China-based companies. The indictment states that in June 2022, Ding received emails from the CEO of Beijing Rongshu Lianzhi Technology Co., Ltd., offering him a chief technology officer position with a monthly salary of 100,000 yuan—about $14,800 at the time—along with an annual bonus and company stock.
Ding “never informed Google about his affiliation with Rongshu,” the indictment said.
The following year, Ding founded Shanghai Zhisuan Technology Co. Ltd., a startup focused on developing software to accelerate machine-learning workloads, including the training of large AI models, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors said the stolen trade secrets included details about Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips and systems, its Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)-based computing systems, and the software that enables thousands of chips to communicate and operate as a single supercomputer. They also noted that the trade secrets involved information on Google’s custom SmartNIC, specialized networking hardware used to move data efficiently between machines in high-performance and cloud computing environments.
Prosecutors said the jury’s economic-espionage verdict reflects evidence that Ding’s actions were consistent with efforts to build and finance a China-based venture. The superseding indictment cites investor pitch materials and internal documents that claimed the team could recreate Google-scale computing capacity within China.
The Justice Department also said Ding applied to a China-based “talent program” and circulated materials that framed the work as helping the Chinese regime achieve global levels of computing power.
The Epoch Times reached out to Ding’s lawyer for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.
Ding is scheduled to appear at a status conference on Feb. 3, with no sentencing date set. Prosecutors said he faces up to 15 years in prison on each economic espionage count, and up to 10 years on each trade secret count.
The verdict comes at a time when AI infrastructure—specialized chips, high-speed networking equipment, and the software that binds them together—has become a core business asset and a national security concern.
Ding’s case follows a pattern prosecutors have described for years: insiders with legitimate access copying large volumes of sensitive files before switching jobs, launching rival ventures, or seeking funding overseas.
In a 2020 public speech, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau was opening a new China-related counterintelligence case “about every 10 hours,” adding that nearly half of the FBI’s active counterintelligence cases at the time were tied to China.
In a separate national security case, the Justice Department announced in November 2025 that an engineer, Gong Chenguang, was sentenced to 46 months in federal prison for stealing nuclear missile-detection trade secrets. That case also involved allegations linked to China’s “talent program” recruitment—an overlap with what prosecutors highlighted in the Ding filings.
The FBI has said that economic espionage costs the U.S. economy “hundreds of billions of dollars” each year and has warned that China-related cases make up a significant share of its counterintelligence workload.
