Linwei Ding, the former Google software engineer who copied the company’s AI supercomputing designs while building startups in China, was sentenced on Tuesday to twelve months minus a day in federal prison, plus two years of supervised release, restitution and a fine.
US District Judge Vince Chhabria imposed the sentence in San Francisco on convictions that are narrower than the ones a jury returned. In January a federal jury convicted Ding on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of trade secret theft after an 11-day trial. In August Chhabria threw out the espionage convictions, finding that prosecutors had not shown Ding knowingly or intentionally acted for the benefit of the Chinese government. The theft convictions stood, and they are what he was sentenced on.
What he took was the design of Google’s AI infrastructure. Prosecutors said that between May 2022 and April 2023 Ding moved more than 2,000 pages of confidential material out of Google’s network: Tensor Processing Units, GPU systems, SmartNIC network cards, and the software that coordinates large numbers of chips into a working supercomputer. The exfiltration method was mundane. According to the indictment, he copied text from Google source files into the Apple Notes application on his work MacBook, converted the notes to PDFs, and uploaded those to a personal cloud account, which helped him evade immediate detection.
He was building a business at the same time. A month into the copying he received a CTO offer from Beijing Rongshu Lianzhi Technology, a machine learning acceleration startup, at 100,000 renminbi a month. He spent five months in China raising money for it, then founded Shanghai Zhisuan Technology and made himself chief executive. A document he circulated in a company chat group said the team had “experience with Google’s ten-thousand-card computational power platform” and needed only to “replicate and upgrade it.”
Google’s own logs caught up with him rather than stopping him. Investigators later found footage of another employee badging into a Google building on Ding’s behalf, making it appear he was in California during weeks he spent in Beijing. The company suspended his access in late December 2023 after learning he had presented at a Chinese startup incubator as Zhisuan’s chief executive. The FBI executed a search warrant days later.
Chhabria went above the guidelines, which called for zero to six months, saying that range did not capture the seriousness of what Ding did. He described it as a “systematic, brazen effort to steal Google’s property,” and rejected a defense request for home confinement based on Ding’s lack of a prior record. Ding, a Chinese national, arrived in the United States in 2010 for a master’s degree and became a permanent resident in 2021.
The sentence lands in a year of prosecutions aimed at the same flow of technology. Taiwanese prosecutors charged nine people including an Nvidia manager last month over 74 AI servers that reached China, and a Supermicro co-founder was charged in March over an alleged $2.5 billion server diversion scheme. Those cases turn on hardware crossing a border; this one turned on the instructions for building it, moved out through a notes app.
Sources: The American Bazaar, The Register
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team