Context: In October, German supercomputer firm ParTec AG, whose CEO Bernhard Frohwitter is a former patent litigator and known for having founded IPCom, filed a Unified Patent Court (UPC) action against NVIDIA, now the world’s most valuable company with a market capitalization of approximately $4.5 trillion (October 28, 2024 ip fray article). The UPC’s Court of First Instance (CFI) denied an NVIDIA motion to switch the language of proceedings to English (January 17, 2025 ip fray article), a decision that many UPC practitioners welcomed. But one of the two patents-in-suit, EP2628080 (“A computer cluster arrangement for processing a computation task and method for operation thereof”), was definitively revoked by the European Patent Office (EPO), even if only on added-matter grounds that related to one word choice.
What’s new: This morning, ParTec, a publicly-traded operating company, notified investors of the Friday (August 8, 2025) filing of a second patent infringement action against NVIDIA with the UPC’s Munich Local Division (LD). ip fray has found out that the patent-in-suit, EP3614263 (“A computer cluster arrangement for processing a computation task and method for operation thereof”), has been granted only recently. It is from the same family as the revoked ‘080 patent.
Direct impact: This lawsuit is not merely a replacement for the ‘080 patent, but a very significant upgrade of ParTec’s enforcement efforts against NVIDIA. Unlike EP’080, it has unitary effect (which means ParTec is seeking an 18-country injunction) and does not use the claim term that proved fatal (“reassignment”). Also, it is noteworthy that Microsoft did not file a petition for inter partes review (IPR) with the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) over the U.S. equivalent of this patent, though it did with respect to the other. An early 2010s priority date is a sweet spot: enough time to enforce, but old enough to complicate prior art searches.
Wider ramifications: ParTec’s UPC dispute with NVIDIA and the U.S. patent infringement action against Microsoft (November 13, 2024 ip fray article), where a Markman (claim construction) hearing wil take place in a month (September 12, 2025), are closely related. Microsoft uses NVIDIA chips, but so do many others. The AI ecosystem will be watching those cases closely. One of ip fray‘s policies, at least for the near term, is that our reporting on closely AI-related patent matters is not paywalled, though we have begun paywalling parts of other articles (example), primarily because our ai fray website, which has 28K LinkedIn followers, is entirely free.
When ParTec filed its original two-patent lawsuit with the UPC last year, EP’080 had been revoked, but ParTec asserted it nonetheless, presumably seeing a decent probability of reviving it on appeal. But when a Technical Board of Appeal (TBA) of the EPO affirmed revocation, it was over for that one.
In the meantime, ParTec kept prosecuting a divisional, and that effort resulted in the grant of the patent they are asserting now. While this means their second case is significantly behind the first one, it is now also more forceful by virtue of the patent’s unitary effect. And the fact that Microsoft didn’t even try to challenge the U.S. equivalent at the PTAB bodes well, too.
Five firms are representing ParTec
In this new case, where English will be the language of proceedings, Powell Gilbert has the lead: Rajvinder Jagdev and Peter FitzPatrick.
ParTec’s lead counsel from the other NVIDIA case is involved here, too: attorney-at-law Dr. Roman Sedlmaier (lead counsel) and patent attorney Jan Gigerich of IPCGS.
Clifford Chance (lead: Dr. Stefan Richter) joined the first ParTec v. NVIDIA litigation later in the game, and is involved here from the get-go.
German and U.S. patent attorney David Molnia of df-mp is also representing ParTec in both cases, as is Frohwitter Intellectual Property Counselors‘ Matthias Himmelsbach (also a patent attorney).
Most likely, NVIDIA will appoint the same lead counsel as in the other ParTec case: Bardehle Pagenberg’s Johannes Heselberger.