Meta has filed a lawsuit against its former VP of infrastructure for allegedly attempting to take proprietary and confidential information about employees to hand over to his new employer, stealth AI startup Omniva.
According to a complaint filed in California state court in Contra Costa County on February 29, Dipinder Singh Khurana, also known as T.S. Khurana, undertook a “stunning” betrayal by uploading information relating to employee pay and performance to his personal Google Drive and Dropbox accounts before leaving the company.
DCD has previously investigated Omniva, a Kuwaiti-backed business that hired a number of high-profile executives from AWS, Microsoft, SambaNova, and TSMC, alongside Khurana from Meta.
Speaking to current and former employees during a three-month period in 2023, DCD found the company’s plan to build 1GW crypto data center in the desert was hamstrung by ill-defined goals and a lack of data center expertise from its top executives, despite having access to an almost bottomless pit of money courtesy of its backers.
The company hired Khurana and others as it pivoted from crypto to AI cloud, but has yet to build a data center. Omniva is not itself accused of misconduct.
According to the lawsuit, which was first reported by Bloomberg, at least eight of the employees Khurana collected information on left Meta to go and work at the startup with him.
Before he left Meta, Khurana, who had worked at the company for 12 years, was accused of pressuring his subordinates into giving him confidential information about agreements Meta had entered into with data center suppliers.
The complaint notes that employees were unaware of his plans, leading to one providing Khurana with “among other things, Meta’s pricing-form agreement with that supplier for the computing hardware and the supplier’s Meta-specific preliminary pricing for a particular chip.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Meta said: “Meta takes this kind of egregious misconduct seriously. We will continue working to protect confidential business and employee information.”
Earlier this month, a former Google engineer was arrested for allegedly stealing AI data center technology from Google while secretly working for two Chinese companies.
According to a statement released by the Justice Department on 6 March, the suspect in that case was charged with “four counts of theft of trade secrets in connection with an alleged plan to steal from Google proprietary information related to artificial intelligence technology.”
