Google has reached a settlement in the $1.67 billion patent infringement lawsuit filed by computer scientist Dr. Joseph Bates.
Details of the settlement have not been disclosed, but Reuters reported the deal was reached on the same day lawyers for both parties were due to make their closing arguments.
In his lawsuit, Bates, who founded the technology licensing and development company Singular Computing in 2005, alleged that instead of licensing his computer architecture designs, Google copied them for the creation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) v2 and v3 processors.
Bates claimed Google had knowledge of his designs because he met with the company on three separate occasions between 2010 and 2014 and shared his computer processing innovations with Google while discussing how to solve challenges related to AI.
TPUs are specialized hardware accelerators designed by Google specifically for accelerating machine learning workloads. These chips have been used by Google to support AI features in a number of Google services, including Google Search, Gmail, and Google Translate.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Google said: "We are pleased to have resolved this matter. As we showed in court, Singular’s patent doesn’t apply to our Tensor Processing Units, which were independently designed and built by Google engineers using Google technology over many years.”