A former Google software engineer has been sentenced to nearly one year in federal prison after being convicted of stealing confidential technology related to the company’s artificial intelligence infrastructure and transferring it to Chinese technology companies.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria sentenced Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, to 12 months minus one day in prison on Sept. 1 in San Francisco. He will also serve two years of supervised release and was ordered to pay restitution and a fine.
The case has drawn attention because of the sensitivity of the technology involved and the broader U.S.-China competition over advanced artificial intelligence and semiconductor technology.
Former Google engineer stole AI infrastructure secrets
Ding joined Google as a software engineer in 2019, giving him access to confidential information concerning the hardware and software used in the company’s AI supercomputing data centers.
Prosecutors said he transferred more than 2,000 pages of confidential information from Google’s systems while working for the company between May 2022 and April 2023. The material included information about Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), GPU systems, networking technology and software used to coordinate large numbers of chips into AI supercomputers.
READ: Ex-Googler quits $300K job after 4 H-1B rejections; gets green card instead (May 29, 2026)
Google’s custom TPU technology is particularly important to its AI operations because the company uses the chips to train and run large AI models at scale.
The stolen information potentially gave another company access to years of research and engineering work without having to repeat the same development process. Experts cited in the case said such information could allow a recipient to bypass significant portions of the design process for an AI supercomputer.
Secret ties to Chinese technology companies
According to U.S. prosecutors, Ding secretly affiliated himself with China-based technology companies while he was still employed by Google.
The government alleged that he transferred Google’s confidential information to personal cloud accounts while pursuing opportunities with Chinese companies and eventually establishing an AI startup in China.
Ding’s conduct eventually came under scrutiny after Google detected suspicious activity and notified U.S. authorities.
A federal jury in San Francisco convicted him in January on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets following an 11-day trial.
However, a significant development came before sentencing. In August, Judge Chhabria threw out the seven economic-espionage convictions after finding that prosecutors had not presented sufficient evidence that Ding knowingly or intentionally acted for the benefit of the Chinese government. His seven trade-secret theft convictions remained in place.
Judge calls theft systematic and brazen
At sentencing, Chhabria said the recommended sentencing range of zero to six months did not adequately reflect the seriousness of Ding’s conduct.
READ: FBI, Australian police arrest two cybercrime suspects (August 31, 2026)
The judge described the theft as a “systematic, brazen effort to steal Google’s property.”
Ding’s defense had sought a sentence involving home confinement, arguing that he had no prior criminal record and was unlikely to commit the same offense again. The judge rejected the request for a noncustodial sentence.
The sentence underscores the growing legal and national-security importance of protecting advanced AI technology as U.S. companies compete with Chinese firms to develop increasingly powerful computing systems.
The case also highlights the vulnerability of technology companies to insider threats. Engineers with access to proprietary chip designs, networking systems and AI infrastructure can potentially transfer highly valuable intellectual property without physically removing hardware from a company’s facilities.
Ding is a Chinese national who moved to the United States in 2010 to pursue a master’s degree. He later worked for several Silicon Valley technology companies before joining Google and became a lawful permanent resident in 2021.
The case is among the clearest examples of how trade-secret enforcement is intersecting with the intensifying U.S.-China race over artificial intelligence, advanced chips and computing infrastructure.