Intel Engineer Sentenced After Stealing 4,000 Trade Secret Files for Microsoft

On August 12, 2025, Varun Gupta — a product marketing engineer at Intel Corporation for nearly a decade, based at the company's largest campus in Hillsboro, Oregon — was sentenced to two years of probation and a $34,472 fine after pleading guilty on February 20, 2025, to one federal count of possessing stolen trade secrets in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1832 under the Economic Espionage Act, a charge filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon on December 26, 2024. Gupta, who had signed an agreement prohibiting him from retaining or copying Intel's proprietary information, downloaded approximately 4,000 files — including confidential and top-secret documents covering pricing structures, strategies, and product development capabilities — from his company-issued computer to personal portable hard drives in January 2020, days before resigning to join Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. Between February and July 2020, while employed at Microsoft, Gupta accessed and weaponized those files during live chip-purchase negotiations with Intel, including a PowerPoint presentation containing Intel's confidential pricing strategy with another major customer. Intel raised concerns in 2020 after Gupta appeared to possess insider knowledge no outside negotiator should have held; a joint investigation followed, Intel sued Gupta in February 2021, and he paid approximately $40,000 in a confidential civil settlement before ultimately admitting to federal investigators that he had possessed the stolen materials. Prosecutors sought eight months of incarceration, arguing the access was repeated and deliberate — a position U.S. District Judge Amy Baggio acknowledged when she stated from the bench, "It wasn't just one incident" — yet the judge imposed no prison time, calculating the $34,472 fine to represent the cost of the imprisonment she declined to order. Gupta, now residing in France and studying vineyard management, permanently forfeited any prospect of senior employment in the technology industry — while the procurement leverage he handed a competitor during months of negotiations against his former employer remains impossible to quantify. - - Disclaimer: This video is a dramatization based on real events. Some visual content was created with artificial intelligence assistance. Some details have been fictionalized and all names have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.