Former Google software engineer Linwei Ding was sentenced on Tuesday, September 1, by US District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco to 12 months minus one day in prison, followed by two years of supervised release. According to reports from KQED, Ding was also ordered to pay more than ₹16 crore (₹189,000) in restitution and a ₹2 crore (₹25,000) fine. The judge stated that the standard sentencing range of zero to six months did not fully reflect the seriousness of Ding's actions, describing the theft as a systematic and brazen attempt to take Google's property. "He knew very well what he was doing. He hurt people along the way," Chhabria added during the sentencing.
According to the US Department of Justice (DOJ), Google had hired Ding as a software engineer in 2019, giving him access to confidential information concerning the hardware and software infrastructure used by Google's supercomputing data centres. As reported by KQED, Ding is a Chinese national who came to the United States in 2010 to pursue a master's degree and later worked for several Silicon Valley technology companies before joining Google in 2019. He became a lawful permanent resident in 2021.
The case centred on Google's proprietary technology for building and operating large-scale AI computing systems. According to the DOJ, the stolen information covered Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips and systems, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) systems, software enabling chips to communicate and perform tasks, and software that coordinates thousands of chips into a supercomputer capable of training and running advanced AI models. The information also included details concerning Google's custom designed SmartNIC, a networking component used in Google's AI supercomputers and cloud networking products. At trial in January, prosecutors showed that Ding uploaded more than 500 confidential files over a course of a year from Google's network to his personal Google Cloud account, with the DOJ stating that in December 2023, less than two weeks before leaving Google, Ding downloaded the stolen material onto his personal computer.
Prosecutors presented evidence of Ding's ties to multiple technology companies in China working on related AI efforts. According to court documents, an early-stage technology company in China offered Ding a chief technology officer position months after he began uploading confidential information to his personal Cloud. Ding visited the company, Rongshu, in late 2022 and began participating in investor meetings around December. In 2023, Ding founded his own technology company, Zhisuan, based in China, which proposed to train large AI models. A Zhisuan document Ding circulated in November 2023 stated: "We have experience with Google's ten-thousand-card computational power platform; we just need to replicate and upgrade it and then further develop a computational power platform suited to China's national conditions." Ding never told Google about his affiliation with either company and had an intern swipe his Google identification card multiple times when he was in China pitching Zhisuan, "to make it appear as though he was working from his office."
A San Francisco jury convicted Ding in January 2026 on seven counts each of economic espionage and theft of trade secrets after an 11-day trial. According to Reuters, in August, US District Judge Vince Chhabria threw out the seven economic espionage convictions, saying prosecutors had not shown that Ding knew his actions would benefit the Chinese government. The seven trade secret convictions remained in place. Ding's lawyers had asked for three months of home confinement instead of prison, arguing that he had already faced major professional and personal consequences and was the primary caregiver for his eight-year-old son, but the judge rejected this request. Ding's defense argued that his circumstances — including widespread press coverage and professional, personal and financial ruin — were sufficient to deter others from taking similar actions, but Chhabria said a noncustodial sentence was hard to swallow for the seriousness of the offense.
