
industrial espionage

AMD has filed (and been granted) a request for immediate injunctive relief against multiple former employees that it alleges stole thousands of confidential documents. Named in the complaint are Robert Feldstein, Manoo Desai, Nicholas Kociuk, and Richard Hagen. All four left AMD to work at Nvidia in the past year. The loss of Feldstein was particularly noteworthy, as he’d been the head of AMD’s console initiatives for years. Feldstein was behind the work that landed AMD the Wii U, PS4, and Xbox Durango. He also worked closely with Microsoft during the Xbox 360’s development cycle and brought that contract to ATI prior to AMD’s acquisition.

The AMD complaint states that “He [Feldstein] transferred sensitive AMD documents, and in the next six months, the three defendants either did the same thing, violated ‘no-solicitation of employees’ promises, or both — all obvious violations of common law, statute, and/or contracts with AMD.” AMD claims to have forensic evidence that three of the four defendants transferred more than 10,000 confidential files in total, with the names of the files in question matching “either identically or very closely to the names of files on their AMD systems that include obviously confidential, proprietary, and/or trade secret materials related to developing technology.”

Furthermore, the company states that it has evidence that Hagen and Feldstein directly recruited Desai and Kociuk as well as attempted to solicit other employees from AMD. It then details the contents of specific folders and emails that were apparently transferred to external storage, and the list is pretty damning. Desai and Kociuk discussed how to eliminate evidence of transfer from their AMD systems. The named defendants ran Google searches for how to copy and delete large numbers of documents. Over 150,000 documents related to AMD desktop and laptop design were transferred before Kociuk turned in his resignation to AMD.

Wii U

The court has ordered that the named defendants retain all pertinent documents, prepare their computers and storage devices for forensic evaluation, and refrain from taking any action that would obfuscate the location of said devices or the data contained therein.

Nvidia hasn’t been named or sued directly, so it’s not clear if the company officially asked AMD’s employees to steal data or if they did so of their own volition. While trade secret theft can (and does) occur, the fact is, semiconductor design is a fairly small business. The engineers who work in the field have often worked for multiple companies and it’s not unusual for seasoned employees to have prominent roles with multiple firms. In 2008, an engineer named Biswamohan Pani took a job with AMD while working for Intel — and began stealing documents from Santa Clara with the intent of leaking them to AMD. In that case, AMD claimed to have no knowledge of the theft, cooperated fully with the ensuing investigation, and was never named as party or beneficiary of the rogue engineer’s actions.

How Nvidia responds to these allegations will shape what happens next and what actions AMD wants to take. If the documents were turned over to Team Green, or if it recruited employees to steal them, this could explode into a mass of litigation. At this point, however, that seems unlikely. AMD’s allegations are specific enough that the company would likely know already if NV had directly been behind the espionage attempt.