A former Google engineer has been sentenced to just under a year in prison for stealing the company’s AI chip secrets for China, in the first AI-related economic espionage conviction in US history.

Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, was convicted by a federal jury on January 29, 2026, on all 14 counts, seven of economic espionage and seven of trade-secret theft. Between 2022 and 2023, he stole more than 500 files and 2,000 pages of confidential material covering Google’s TPU and GPU supercomputing infrastructure.

US District Judge Vince Chhabria called the theft “systematic” and “brazen”. Prosecutors said Ding took the material to benefit Chinese entities while still employed at Google.

The case marks a milestone in the US crackdown on technology theft amid the AI arms race. It signals that American courts will treat the theft of AI infrastructure secrets with the same severity as traditional defence-related espionage, with more prosecutions expected in the sector.