A federal grand jury has indicted a Google engineer, Linwei Ding, aka Leon Ding, for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to Google's AI chip software and hardware on March 5 before killing him on Wednesday morning in Newark, California , was arrested. Assistant Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement that Ding “stole over 500 confidential files containing AI trade secrets from Google while secretly working for China-based companies seeking a leg up in the AI technology race.”
A large part of the stolen data allegedly revolves around Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips. Google's TPU chips support many of its AI workloads and, when paired with Nvidia GPUs, can train and run AI models like Gemini. The company has also offered access to the chips through partner platforms such as Hugging Face.
Image: Ministry of Justice
The files allegedly stolen include software designs for the v4 and v6 TPU chips, hardware and software specifications for GPUs used in Google's data center, and designs for Google's machine learning workloads in data centers.
The government accuses Ding of transferring these files to a personal Google Cloud account between May 2022 and May 2023.
He allegedly did this “by copying data from the Google source files into the Apple Notes application on his Google-issued MacBook laptop” and then converting them from Apple Notes to PDFs to avoid detection by Google's “systems to prevent “To avoid data loss”.
According to the government, a Chinese machine learning company called Rongshu offered to appoint him as CTO less than a month after he began stealing files. He flew to China for five months to raise money for the company and then founded and ran a machine learning startup called Zhisuan while still working for Google. He resigned from Google in December 2023 – and reportedly booked a one-way ticket to Beijing, departing two days after his end date – after the company began questioning him about his uploads.
The DOJ also alleges that in December 2023, he allegedly faked his presence at Google's US office by having another employee scan his ID at the door while he was actually in China. Ding has been charged with four counts of theft of trade secrets, so if convicted he faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count.