SAN FRANCISCO—Linwei Ding, 38, also known as Leon Ding, after an 11-day federal trial in San Francisco, a jury found him guilty of 14 counts, which included seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets on Thursday, January 29, 2026.
On January 12, 2026, Ding’s trial began at the United States (U.S.) District Court for the Northern District of California. He joined Google on May 2019 as a software engineer.
From May 2022 to April 2023, Ding systematically stole over 2,000 pages of confidential AI infrastructure data, which included details of Tensor Processing Units (TPU) chips and Smart Network Interface Card or SmartNIC technology, which he uploaded to his personal Google Cloud account.
in June 2022, while still at Google, he started discussing being a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for a startup in China. Early in 2023, he found his own AI company, serving as Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Late in 2023, he applied to a Chinese government-sponsored “talent plan” in Shanghai, pledging to help China’s reach its computing levels internationally. In December 2023, less than 2 weeks before his resignation, Ding downloaded the stolen AI files onto his personal computer. On January 5, 2024, Ding resigned from Google.
In March 2024, a federal grand jury indicted Ding, and he was apprehended at his home in Newark, California. Iin February 2025, a superseding indictment was returned, expanding the charges to include economic espionage.
Ding will be imprisoned for a maximum of 15 years for each espionage count and 10 years for each theft count. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, February 3, 2026.
