The German automotive supplier Valeo is suing the graphics card giant Nvidia in a court in California. For stealing company secrets, which saved Nvidia millions of dollars in development costs. Valeo is therefore demanding damages from Nvidia, as The Verge reports. Valeo also wants to obtain an injunction preventing Nvidia and its employees from using or disclosing Valeo’s trade secrets.
Video conference between Valeo and Nvidia employees
Valeo presents the case like this: Valeo employee Mohammad M. moved to Nvidia in August 2021. Both companies were working on the development of a parking aid, the software for this was to be supplied by Nvidia and the ultrasonic sensor hardware by Valeo.
Employees from both companies had a video conference via Teams on March 8, 2022. The ex-Valeo and then Nvidia employee Mohammad M. shared his screen to play a Powerpoint presentation. After this presentation was finished, Mohammad M. minimized the presentation but continued to share his screen with the other conference participants.
A serious mistake: The Valeo employees who took part in the video conference now saw that Mohammad M. had opened a source code file on his computer. The Valeo employees recognized this because, according to Valeo, it came from the German company. You could even read the ValeoDocs file path. The Valeo employees identified the source code and immediately took a screenshot of the screen to preserve evidence.
When the German police later searched Mohammad M.’s apartment, the officers seized documentation, software and hardware components that were said to have come from Valeo. Mohammad M. used this Valeo content for his work at Nvidia. Mohammad M. admitted to stealing Valeo’s software when he was questioned by German police, according to the lawsuit.
Valeo accuses Mohammad M. of downloading the entire source code of Valeo’s parking and driving assistance systems without authorization at the beginning of 2021. Mohammad M. also took with him various Word, Powerpoint, PDF and Excel files that are related to Valeo technology. He then switched to Nvidia.
According to Bloomberg, a court in Stuttgart sentenced Mohammad M. to a fine of 14,400 euros in September 2023.
According to The Verge, Nvidia claims that it has no interest in Valeo’s corporate secrets. Mohammad M. claimed that the Valeo source code would only be on his own notebook and that other Nvidia employees would not have access to it.