Google Faces Potential Billion-Dollar Damages in TPU Patent Dispute

Tech giant Google is embroiled in a high-stakes legal battle over the alleged infringement of patents related to its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), custom AI accelerator chips used to power machine learning applications. Massachusetts-based startup Singular Computing has accused Google of incorporating architectures described in several of its patents into the design of the TPU without permission. The disputed patents, first filed in 2009, outline computer architectures optimized for executing a high volume of low-precision calculations per cycle - an approach well-suited for neural network-based AI. In a 2019 lawsuit, Singular argues that Google knowingly infringed on these patents in developing its TPU v2 and TPU v3 chips introduced in 2017 and 2018. Singular Computing is seeking between $1.6 billion and $5.19 billion in damages from Google.