Intel hit with $2.18B patent judgment
Intel Corp. was hit with a $2.18 billion judgment Tuesday for violating two chip-making patents.
A federal jury in the Western District of Texas found that the chipmaker infringed on two patents owned by VLSI Technology LLC, a company that has no products or revenue besides the lawsuit against Intel, Bloomberg Law reported Monday.
Intel — a Santa Clara-based company with significant operations in Portland and Phoenix — unsuccessfully motioned for a mistrial on Monday. The company vowed to fight the ruling.
“Intel strongly disagrees with today’s jury verdict. We intend to appeal and are confident that we will prevail,” Intel spokeswoman Stephanie Matthew said in an emailed statement.
Short of a successful appeal, Intel owes $1.5 billion for infringing on one of the two patents and $675 million for the other.
Shares of Intel sank more than 7% on the news and were trading lower than $57 per share after hours. The company’s stock price has risen more than 9% over the last year.
It wasn’t all bad news for Intel’s patent team on Tuesday, however.
The Federal Circuit affirmed a ruling from the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board that sided with Intel against Qualcomm, finding that Qualcomm’s computer power-saving patent is invalid, Law360 reported.
The patent judgment in the VLSI Technology case is one of the largest patent in U.S. history, Bloomberg Law reported. It even dwarfed a $1.9 billion patent infringement judgment against Cisco Systems Inc. from last year.
In that case, the San Jose-based networking giant was ordered to pay damages and interest for what the court called the “willful and egregious” infringement on four patents held by Centripetal Networks, a Virginia-based cybersecurity firm.
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