Judge Overturns Economic Espionage Conviction of Ex-Google Engineer Linwei Ding
A federal judge overturned part of the conviction of former Google engineer Linwei Ding for stealing AI trade secrets. The judge found insufficient evidence that Ding intended to aid the Chinese government, overturning seven economic espionage counts while upholding conviction on theft of trade secrets charges.
What happened
Linwei Ding, a former Google software engineer, was found guilty in January 2026 after an 11-day trial of seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets for stealing thousands of pages of confidential information about Google's AI infrastructure.
On August 20, 2026, U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria overturned the seven economic espionage counts, ruling there was insufficient evidence that Ding intended or knew his conduct would benefit the Chinese government. The judge upheld the conviction on theft of trade secrets charges.
Prosecutors alleged Ding joined Google in May 2019 and began stealing three years later when being courted by an early-stage Chinese technology company. The stolen information concerned hardware infrastructure and software platforms for training large AI models in Google's supercomputing data centers.
Reported impact
Some of the allegedly stolen chip blueprints were intended to give Google competitive advantage over cloud computing rivals Amazon and Microsoft, and to reduce Google's reliance on Nvidia chips.
Governance controls
Google was not charged and stated it cooperated with law enforcement.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.