Ex-Google Engineer Convicted of Stealing AI Data for China

Linwei Ding Faces Decades in Prison for Trade Secret Theft, Espionage Rashmi Ramesh (rashmiramesh_) • February 2, 2026

A federal jury in San Francisco convicted a former Google software engineer of stealing thousands of pages of confidential artificial intelligence data and transferring it to Chinese technology companies.

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Linwei Ding, who joined Google in 2019, is guilty of seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of trade secret theft following an 11-day trial. The verdict came after prosecutors presented evidence that Ding uploaded proprietary information to his personal cloud account between May 2022 and April 2023, then used that knowledge to establish competing ventures in China.

Stolen materials included more than 2,000 pages of confidential documentation detailing Google's AI supercomputing infrastructure. Ding accessed proprietary information about the company's tensor processing unit and graphics processing unit system ...