Former Google Engineer Sold GPU and TPU Trade Secrets to China, Court Rules

On Friday, a San Francisco court convicted former Google engineer Linwei Ding of economic espionage and theft of trade secrets. During his short tenure at the company, he stole thousands of pages of confidential information, including Google's trade secrets on AI hardware. He now faces a potential prison sentence of up to 10 years per count for trade secrets theft and up to 15 years per count for economic espionage, totaling over 170 years.

As Tom's Hardware reports, Ding began working at Google in 2019 but conducted his espionage campaign between May 2022 and April 2023. During that time, he stole documents relating to how Google builds and manages its AI data centers. It included specifications for its TPU hardware, TPU instruction sets, and performance characteristics for HBM and chip interconnects. He also stole documents from Google's GPU servers, including how it builds GPU clusters and its ...