AMD Sues Four Ex-Employees, Claims Massive Document Theft

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has filed a lawsuit against four former employees, claiming that the workers stole information from the company’s Boxborought plant. The lawsuit involves one former vice president and three ex-managers. All four employees left AMD in 2012 and immediately accepted positions at Nvidia.

In the lawsuit, AMD claims that the employees copied and then stole more than 100,000 confidential documents and trade secrets, information they handed over to Nvidia.

AMD is demanding that Nvidia and the former employees return all stolen documents immediately. The documents are believed to include information about future AMD releases and customer contracts.

The lawsuit names Vice President Robert Feldstein and managers Manoo Desai, Nicolas Kociuk, and Richard Hagen. AMD claims the men are all in breach of contract and in violation of trade secret laws and unfair competition laws. The company claims the men infringed upon the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The US District Court of Massachusetts has filed a temporary restraining order against the four men, demanding the preservation of any AMD materials they may still have in their possession. The accused men must also avoid handing over to Nvidia any hardware or data storage devices still in their possession.

According to AMD:

“The volume of materials that these three defendants collectively transferred to storage devices, each of which is unaccounted for, as they left to work for AMD’s competitor exceeds 100,000 electronic files.”

AMD says the files “include obviously confidential, proprietary, and/or trade secret materials relating to developing technology and/or highly confidential business strategy.”

The lawsuit claims that one manager even Google’d how to copy and download large amounts of files before stealing AMD documentation.