A U.S. federal jury has convicted Linwei Ding, a former software program engineer at Google, for stealing AI supercomputer knowledge from his employer and secretly sharing it with Chinese language tech companies.
Ding was initially indicted in March 2024 after he lied and didn’t sincerely cooperate with Google’s inside investigation, resulting in his arrest in California.
Based on the prosecutors, between Could 2022 and April 2023, Ding stole over 2,000 pages of confidential AI-related supplies from Google and uploaded them to his private Google Cloud account.
The stolen recordsdata contained key details about Google’s AI super-computing infrastructure, proprietary TPU and GPU system applied sciences, orchestration software program for large-scale AI workloads, and SmartNIC networking expertise.
Ding, who began at Google in 2019, was additionally secretly affiliated with two China-based expertise corporations and even negotiated a job as Chief Know-how Officer (CTO) at considered one of them.
Later, he based his personal AI firm in China (Shanghai Zhisuan Know-how Co.), serving as its CEO, and informed potential traders he might construct AI supercomputing infrastructure much like Google’s.
Proof confirmed that Ding sought to help entities linked to the Individuals’s Republic of China, utilized to a Shanghai government-sponsored expertise program, and acknowledged his aim was to assist China attain international-level computing infrastructure capabilities.
“The jury heard proof pertaining to the PRC authorities’s institution of expertise plans to encourage people to come back to China to contribute to the PRC’s financial and technological progress,” mentions the U.S. DoJ announcement.
“Ding’s software for this expertise plan acknowledged that he deliberate to ‘assist China to have computing energy infrastructure capabilities which can be on par with the worldwide degree.’”
“The proof at trial additionally confirmed that Ding meant to learn two entities managed by the federal government of China by aiding with the event of an AI supercomputer and collaborating on the analysis and growth of customized machine studying chips.”
Ding by no means knowledgeable Google about his affiliations with the talked about companies or disclosed his travels to China, even asking a colleague to periodically scan his entrance badge at his office to make it seem as if he was nonetheless within the U.S., working.
Following an 11-day trial in San Francisco, Ding was convicted on seven counts of financial espionage and 7 counts of commerce secret theft, every carrying a most imprisonment sentence of 10-15 years. Nevertheless, no sentences have been introduced but.
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