Theft, not betrayal. This is where, after two and a half years of proceedings, the most scrutinized file in Silicon Valley, technological cold war version, ends up. On September 1, 2026, in San Francisco, federal judge Vince Chhabria sentenced former Google engineer Linwei Ding to twelve months in prison less a day for theft of industrial secrets linked to artificial intelligence. However, a jury found him guilty in January of fourteen counts: seven for this theft, seven others for economic espionage for the benefit of Beijing.
The second block collapsed in the middle of summer, the judge considering the evidence too thin. All that remains is one unscrupulous employee who copied 1,255 documents before resigning. Not the undercover agent Washington hoped to bring down. At Google, this is not even the first time this year that an in-house engineer has found himself in an embarrassing case of misappropriated internal information. Proof of a link with Beijing remains the real obstacle.
Chhabria did not use verbal half-measures, even if the sentence remains measured. “This was a systematic and brazen effort to steal Google property and profit from it,” he said at the September 1 hearing, before adding that he had a “tremendous difficulty imagining” not sending Ding to prison for what he had done.
Twelve months less one day of detention, two years of probation, more than $198,000 in compensation to Google and a $2,500 fine. Here's the bill. Ding must surrender himself as a prisoner within 90 days.
The public prosecutor demanded 70 months in prison. The defense proposed three months of house arrest, time to stay with his eight-year-old son. Sixty-seven months separate the two requests. Even the judge had difficulty balancing the two: the official recommendations, calculated only on the theft leaders who remained after the summer, capped at six months. A range that he himself considered too lenient for a “systematic effort”. Ding’s lawyer has already announced an appeal.
A popular jury had nevertheless voted for the fourteen leaders of a bloc in January. Seven months later, on August 20, Chhabria reversed half of the verdict in an order of partial acquittal. Chhabria considered the evidence too thin. It was necessary to establish, at the time of the illegal transfers, that Ding already knew that his gesture would benefit Beijing, under the classic standard of reasonable doubt.
The theft of documents dates back to May 2022, April 2023. The proof of a link with the Chinese state comes from elsewhere, and especially after the fact. Ding founded his company Zhisuan in China in late 2023, and an intern was tasked with discreetly stealing his Google badge while he was canvassing investors in Beijing. Too late to prove an intention which, by definition, must already have existed at the time of the crime. Chhabria did not deny the theft. He denied the conspiracy. The seven counts of theft of secrets still stand, and it is on them alone that the sentence of September 1 was calculated.
Reducing the matter to stolen PDFs would be a misreading. The 1,255 documents, approximately 14,000 pages, describe the architecture of Google's TPUs, these tailor-made artificial intelligence chips that the firm designs internally to no longer depend on Nvidia GPUs.
There are also the diagrams of a homemade SmartNIC, a network card capable of bringing together thousands of chips at full speed to make them function as a single supercomputer, as well as the software that orchestrates everything. This is the complete user manual for an industrial advantage that Google spent a decade building, not just any technical manual. Ding transferred the bulk of the lot between May 2022 and April 2023, while he was still employed. A final batch was downloaded in December 2023, to a personal Google Cloud account. Two weeks later, he resigned.
Ding didn't invent anything. Long before him, in the midst of the China Initiative era, Washington had already attempted the same move with Fujian Jinhua, a Chinese semiconductor manufacturer accused of having conspired with the Taiwanese UMC to steal the manufacturing secrets of memory chips from the American Micron. This Department of Justice program, launched under the first Trump administration to track Chinese economic espionage, targeted precisely this type of file. UMC pleaded guilty and paid $60 million in fines. Fujian Jinhua went as far as the trial.
Verdict at the end of February 2024: total acquittal, including on the theft itself. Judge Maxine Chesney ruled that the prosecution had failed to prove that the company, although owned by the Chinese state, had misappropriated Micron's DRAM designs. The Ministry of Justice had already learned its lesson two years earlier by dismantling the China Initiative, in February 2022. Its head at the time himself recognized that it fueled a climate of suspicion, and that prosecutions against academic researchers more often resulted in dismissals than in convictions. Ding is the first big test afterwards. Deterrence takes a hit. An engineer tempted by a Chinese startup now knows that a one-way ticket will cost him, at worst, a year in prison, not the life sentence that the Ministry of Justice has been promoting since 2018.
