AI Arms Race Targets Google TPUs as DOJ Charges Ex-Googler with Espionage

The AI arms race is now in full swing, and corporate espionage is reaching levels beyond what we previously imagined. According to the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), former Google software engineer Linwei Ding has been convicted of economic espionage and theft of confidential AI technology, specifically related to Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). An FBI investigation revealed that the ex-Googler was suspected of stealing information about the entire infrastructure surrounding TPUs, including chip architecture, external connectivity, and more. The DOJ concluded that Linwei Ding was acting for the benefit of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), with the primary goal of stealing sensitive intellectual property that Google has spent years and billions of US Dollars developing. Naturally, Google collaborated with the FBI to protect its intellectual property and found the former employee guilty of stealing as many as two thousand pages of confidential information.

U.S. Department of JusticeThe trade secrets contained detailed information about the architecture and functionality of Google’s custom Tensor Processing Unit chips and systems and Google’s Graphics Processing Unit systems, the software that allows the chips to communicate and execute tasks, and the software that orchestrates thousands of chips into a supercomputer capable of training and executing cutting-edge AI workloads. The trade secrets also pertained to Google’s custom-designed SmartNIC, a type of network interface card used to facilitate high speed communication within Google’s AI supercomputers and cloud networking products.

Google’s unique AI chip architecture and infrastructure enables the company to reduce its dependence on external GPU production from AMD and NVIDIA. The latest Gemini 3 model has been trained and is now exclusively operated on TPUs, with no involvement from NVIDIA or AMD GPUs. Google has introduced the TPUv8ax, known as “Sunfish,” for training AI models like Gemini, and the TPUv8x, called “Zebrafish,” for large-scale model inference. For “Sunfish,” Google has collaborated with Broadcom and its custom design team, which manages the end-to-end design, memory, supporting hardware, and packaging. This partnership provides Google with a finished product ready for integration into its custom server infrastructure. What truly distinguishes Google’s infrastructure is the careful planning of connectivity and the interconnection of tens of thousands of these TPUs, making it highly desirable for large training runs, and now a target of external espionage.