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AMD accuses former staff of giving 100,000 secret documents to NVIDIA

AMD is suing four ex-employees for allegedly taking thousands of confidential documents with them when they left the company and went to work for NVIDIA. A complaint filed to the District Court of Massachusetts reveals that AMD's former VP of Strategic Development Robert Feldstein, who was instrumental in designing graphics chips for early Xbox 360 consoles and the Wii, is among the defendants. He's accused of playing a role in the electronic transfer of over 100,000 files containing "trade secret materials relating to developing technology." AMD claims it has "forensically-recovered data" to show that external storage devices were used in the days prior to Feldstein's departure, and also that he and another senior exec, Richard Hagen, actively recruited the two other defendants to join them at NVIDIA, in violation of agreements they had signed. Of course, this is just AMD's side of the story. The company told us in a statement that it intends to "aggressively protect" its trade secrets through this litigation, so the rest will just have to play out in court.