AMD has filed (and been granted) a request for immediate injunctive relief against multiple former employees that it alleges stole thousands of confidential documents. Named in the complaint are Robert Feldstein, Manoo Desai, Nicholas Kociuk, and Richard Hagen. All four left AMD to work at Nvidia in the past year. The loss of Feldstein was particularly noteworthy, as he’d been the head of AMD’s console initiatives for years. Feldstein was behind the work that landed AMD the Wii U, PS4, and Xbox Durango. He also worked closely with Microsoft during the Xbox 360′s development cycle and brought that contract to ATI prior to AMD’s acquisition.

The AMD complaint states that “He

[Feldstein] transferred sensitive AMD documents, and in the next six months, the three defendants either did the same thing, violated ‘no-solicitation of employees’ promises, or both — all obvious violations of common law, statute, and/or contracts with AMD.” AMD claims to have forensic evidence that three of the four defendants transferred more than 10,000 confidential files in total, with the names of the files in question matching “either identically or very closely to the names of files on their AMD systems that include obviously confidential, proprietary, and/or trade secret materials related to developing technology.”

Furthermore, the company states that it has evidence that Hagen and Feldstein directly recruited Desai and Kociuk as well as attempted to solicit other employees from AMD. It then details the contents of specific folders and emails that were apparently transferred to external storage, and the list is pretty damning. Desai and Kociuk discussed how to eliminate evidence of transfer from their AMD systems. The named defendants ran Google searches for how to copy and delete large numbers of documents. Over 150,000 documents related to AMD desktop and laptop design were transferred before Kociuk turned in his resignation to AMD.

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