Former Google engineer convicted of stealing GPU and TPU trade secrets for 'Chinese interests' — tried to raise funding for his own start-up

A former Google engineer, Linwei Ding, has been convicted of stealing GPU and TPU trade secrets for the benefit of Chinese interests. He was found guilty on 14 counts, including economic espionage and theft of trade secrets, for copying internal technical documents while working at Google and pursuing funding for his own start-up. The stolen material covered AI data center design, TPU system architectures, and GPU cluster orchestration at Google. Ding faces up to 10 years in prison for each of the seven counts of economic espionage, marking a significant win in AI-related economic espionage cases for the U.S. Department of Justice.