On June 4, 2025, Inspur, a Chinese technology company, withdrew its invalidation petitions against four Chinese patents owned by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE), thereby closing the respective proceedings. This move may signal a potential turning point in the high-profile, cross-border patent dispute that has unfolded over the past year between the two companies in both China and the United States. It also raises speculation that a settlement between the parties may be on the horizon.
The dispute began on April 15, 2024, when HPE filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Inspur, accusing the company’s enterprise-grade server products of infringing five U.S. patents.
Interestingly, the technologies at the heart of the two parties’ respective legal actions differ significantly. HPE’s lawsuit in the U.S. primarily concerns storage, power management, and system management technologies for servers, while the four Chinese patents that Inspur previously challenged relate to cooling technologies.
According to HPE’s court filing, the dispute originated three years earlier. HPE claims it attempted to contact Inspur as early as August 2021 through various channels to address the alleged infringement, but received no response. The products in question are enterprise-class servers.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) traces its roots back to the original Hewlett-Packard Company, founded in 1939 in a garage in Silicon Valley, often regarded as the birthplace of the region’s tech industry. In 2015, HP was split into two publicly traded companies:
- HPE, focused on enterprise IT services, infrastructure, and software, and
- HP Inc., focused on personal systems and printing.
In this case, HPE, as plaintiff, is targeting Inspur’s enterprise server products. HPE alleges that Inspur sold its NF5280M5 server in the U.S. under different brand names to bypass restrictions. For example, the server was rebranded and sold by Aivres as KR2280-X1. Aivres’ subsequent product, KR2280-X2, is reportedly identical to KAYTUS's KR2280V2, another Inspur brand.
HPE believes these name changes were related to Inspur’s addition to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List on March 6, 2023, which imposed export restrictions. The rebranding efforts are said to have taken place after this designation.
It is also notable that the five U.S. patents asserted by HPE exist solely within the U.S. patent system and were not filed in China, underscoring a jurisdictional asymmetry in the dispute.
By contrast, Inspur leads or contributes to all Chinese national server standards, is the only Chinese server vendor to be a member of all three major global open computing organizations, and was a founding member of the Open Compute Technical Committee (OCTC). As of August 2022, Inspur held over 10,000 patents globally.
According to IDC market share data, in Q3 2023, Dell led the global server market with an 11.1% share (down 5% YoY), followed by Inspur at 9.1% (up 1.6% YoY), and HPE at 7.1% (down 3.3% YoY).
