Former Google software engineer Linwei Ding was sentenced to nearly one year in federal prison on September 1 for stealing confidential technology used to build and operate the company’s artificial intelligence supercomputers.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria imposed 12 months minus one day, followed by two years of supervised release. Ding must also pay more than $198,000 in restitution to Google and a $2,500 fine.
The sentence exceeded the federal guideline range of zero to six months. Chhabria characterized Ding’s conduct as a “systematic, brazen effort” involving thousands of pages of internal Google material and denied his request to remain free while appealing.
Ding joined Google in 2019 and began transferring confidential material to a personal cloud account in May 2022. Between May 2022 and April 2023, he stole thousands of pages of AI trade secrets covering hardware and software used inside Google’s supercomputing data centers.
The material included architecture and functionality for Google’s Tensor Processing Unit chips, GPU systems, high-speed SmartNIC networking technology and software used to coordinate thousands of chips into infrastructure capable of training and running large AI models.
Ding copied information from Google source files into Apple Notes on his company laptop, converted the material into PDFs and uploaded it to personal storage. He later downloaded the stolen material onto his own computer shortly before leaving Google.
The case follows another internal-data prosecution involving a Google engineer and crypto markets. Michele Spagnuolo was charged over a $1.2 million Polymarket scheme in May after allegedly accessing confidential Google search-trend data and using it to trade prediction-market contracts before the information became public.
While still employed by Google, Ding became involved with an early-stage Chinese technology company and later developed his own China-based AI startup.
His investor materials claimed the startup could build an AI supercomputer by copying and modifying Google technology. A federal jury initially convicted Ding in January on seven counts of theft of trade secrets and seven counts of economic espionage.
The trade-secret convictions survived post-trial challenges. Chhabria later vacated all seven economic espionage counts on August 20 after finding insufficient evidence that Ding intended or knew his theft would benefit the Chinese government, a separate element required under the economic espionage statute.
The ruling left intact the finding that Ding intended to benefit himself and his emerging Chinese AI company through the stolen technology.
Federal prosecutors sought a 70-month prison sentence, while Ding’s defense requested three months of home confinement. Chhabria rejected a noncustodial sentence, finding that the guideline range did not adequately reflect the seriousness of the theft.
Ding also sought to delay imprisonment during his appeal, but the request was denied. He must surrender to begin his 12-month-minus-one-day prison term within 90 days.
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