An engineer who stole trade secrets from Intel and shared them with his new bosses at Microsoft was sentenced Tuesday to two years of probation and ordered to pay a fine of more than $34,000.
Varun Gupta, now 45, had worked as a product marketing engineer for Intel from July 2010 to January 2020 before leaving for Microsoft.
“In an industry with high turnover and where employees regularly move to competitors, such behavior cannot be excused and must be deterred,” Assistant U.S. Attorney William Narus wrote in a sentencing memo. “Not only did the defendant take proprietary materials with him, he also used those materials during negotiations against his prior employer.”
Gupta copied thousands of files containing proprietary material from his Intel computer to a portable hard drive and “repeatedly accessed those trade secret documents” as he helped represent Microsoft in negotiations with Intel for a contract related to product design and pricing for significant purchases of computer processors, according to Narus.
Among the trade secrets shared was a PowerPoint presentation referencing Intel’s pricing strategy with another major customer, according to court records.
Narus sought an eight-month prison term for Gupta, arguing that the “repetitive nature” of Gupta’s conduct distinguished his case from other trade secret prosecutions that have typically resulted in probation.
Defense attorney David Angeli said Gupta made a “serious error in judgment,” but already has suffered tremendously: He lost the high-level position he had worked years to attain, paid $40,000 to settle a civil suit against him by Intel and experienced lasting damage to his reputation that effectively ended his career in the tech sector.
Gupta relocated his family to France to start anew and began graduate studies in vineyard management, is completing an internship at a winery and hopes to work as a technical director in the wine industry, Angeli said.
Angeli disputed that Gupta’s case stands out from other trade secret cases, arguing that Gupta didn’t share secrets with a competitor but with Microsoft, then a customer, didn’t transfer sensitive data to an adversarial party and didn’t enrich himself.
Gupta, wearing a brown suit and seated between Angeli and defense attorney Michelle Kerin, read from a prepared statement and apologized to Intel and Microsoft, as well as the government for the time and resources it has spent “because of my bad decision.”
He said he struggles with deep questions daily about his future and “his legacy” as he works to put his life back together in a different country.
“I would have never imagined I would be sitting here when I was going through my education and coming to this country,” he said.
Born in India, Gupta graduated with an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology and came to the U.S. to pursue graduate education. Over the next seven years, he earned three advanced degrees: a master’s in engineering from Drexel University and a master’s in mathematics and a Ph. D. in engineering from Rutgers University.
He worked as a principal for strategic planning in cloud and AI at Microsoft before he was fired.
U.S. District Judge Amy Baggio issued the probationary sentence recommended by defense lawyers but tacked on a $34,472 fine representing the cost of eight months of federal imprisonment that she didn’t order Gupta to complete.
Baggio said she added the fine for “general deterrence” and said she wanted to make sure Gupta understood that his actions were more than a “one-time” mistake.
“It wasn’t just one incident,” she said. “There was the violation of that trust with the former employer and then subsequent access to that information.”
She also noted that he wasn’t truthful when first confronted in July 2020, though he quickly resolved both his civil and criminal cases since.
“He clearly knows better,” Baggio said.
But she said she didn’t see a need to send Gupta to prison because she believes Gupta has suffered enough through the loss of his reputation.
“I appreciate his use of the word legacy and how important the honor of his family is to him … and understanding the value of everything that he had worked so hard to have for himself and for his family,” she said, “and then to besmirch his own character in such a public way -- that is a significant punishment in this court’s estimation.”
She ordered Gupta to pay the fine by Thursday before he returns to France.
A U.S. probation officer will supervise Gupta from afar, maintaining oversight over his financial documents and approving a new job if Gupta finds one.
-- Maxine Bernstein covers federal court and criminal justice. Reach her at 503-221-8212, mbernstein@oregonian.com, follow her on X @maxoregonian, on Bluesky @maxbernstein.bsky.social or on LinkedIn.
Maxine Bernstein covers federal court, law enforcement and criminal justice issues after spending two decades covering Portland police. She joined The Oregonian in 1998 after a seven-year stint working for The...