The lawsuit alleged that Google stole designs from Singular Computing's founder, Joseph Bates, and used them to develop its second and third generation TPU accelerators without permission or license. Google denied these allegations, asserting that it developed its TPUs independently over many years. Google's TPUs, now in their fifth generation, are the backbone of its AI infrastructure and power a wide variety of the company's internal machine learning workloads.
Key takeaways:
- Google has agreed to settle a multi-billion dollar patent infringement lawsuit filed by Singular Computing for an undisclosed sum.
- Singular Computing was seeking between $1.6 billion and $5.2 billion in damages for Google's unlicensed use of its patents in the development of Google's tensor processing unit (TPU) v2 and v3 AI accelerators.
- The settlement brings an end to a five-year legal battle between Singular Computing and Google.
- Despite the lawsuit, Google continues to deny allegations of patent infringement, asserting that its Tensor Processing Units were developed independently over many years.