Apple has quietly withdrawn its lawsuit against former executive Gerard Williams III in a filing posted on Friday (via Bloomberg).
Top comment by KJ705
The real question is...did those guys develop anything worth $1.4b in less than 2 years? Personally, I think he left Apple knowing there was a Qualcomm payday in his future. And for Qualcomm, I trhink the majority of Nuvia's value was the talent that it took from Apple rather than the talent that Qualcomm acquired.
Williams was described as critical to the development of the high-performance A-series and M-series Apple Silicon chips. He left Apple to start a server chip start-up Nuvia. Apple accused him of poaching colleagues for the start-up whilst he was still under Apple’s employ. Lawsuit proceedings began in 2019.
Nuvia was acquired by Qualcomm in 2021. Late last year, The Information cited Nuvia as one reason for a “brain drain” in the Apple silicon engineering group.
Williams countersued Apple’s 2019 complaint, claiming Apple was hiring his staff and illicitly blocking people from leaving. Apple fought to uphold the suit in the intervening years, with a judge ruling the case could go proceed.
Given how much Apple had pursued the case up to now, it’s a little bizarre for the company to withdraw out of the blue. There may have been a private settlement of terms, although the request for dismissal did not elaborate.
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