Photo Source: Baidu
Chinese cloud-computing giant Inspur has withdrawn its patent invalidity challenges against Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), signaling a potential shift in the ongoing cross-border intellectual property dispute between the two companies.
According to data from the China's National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) earlier this month, Inspur dropped its challenges against four HPE-held Chinese patents (ZL2016800226109, ZL2018111061562, ZL2019109207842, ZL2012800778996). The cases are now officially closed, marking a possible turning point in the dispute and raising the prospect of a broader settlement.
HPE sued Inspur on April 15, 2024 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuit accused Inspur's enterprise-grade servers of infringing five HPE patents related to IT network administration and power consumption technologies (US8,218,566; US7,634,671; US9,229,737; US8,335,891; US8,108,508).
In contrast, Inspur's invalidation efforts in China focused on HPE’s cooling technology patents, indicating that the two sides were contesting different technological domains in each country.
HPE's complaint claims the dispute dates back to August 2021, when the company attempted, unsuccessfully, to resolve the issue privately with Inspur. HPE also alleges that Inspur tried to evade scrutiny by selling products under different brand names in the U.S. after being added to the U.S. Commerce Department’s trade blacklist in March 2023.
For example, Inspur's NF5280M5 server was rebranded and sold in the U.S. by Aivres as the KR2280-X1. A follow-up model, KR2280-X2, was reportedly identical to KAYTUS’s KR2280V2, a company also linked to Inspur.
Notably, HPE's asserted patents are all U.S.-only filings and were not registered in China. Meanwhile, Inspur remains a major force in China's server industry. With a leading role in setting national server standards, HPE is the only vendor active in all three global open computing alliances and held over 10,000 patents as of August 2022.
According to IDC, in Q3 2023, Dell led the global server market with 11.1% share (down 5% year-over-year), followed by Inspur at 9.1% (up 1.6%), and HPE at 7.1% (down 3.3%).
With Inspur stepping back from its Chinese patent challenges, attention now turns to whether the move reflects a de-escalation—or even a possible resolution—of the broader U.S.-China patent dispute.
