Nvidia sued over its Modulus artificial intelligence software.
Trademark dispute
Chipmaker Nvidia has been sued in a Texas federal court by Modulus Financial Engineering, a financial technology company, for Trademark Infringement over Nvidia’s Modulus artificial intelligence software.
Modulus Financial asked the US District Court for the Western District of Texas to tell Nvidia to stop using the Modulus name. They reckon it would confuse with its AI-related software.
When asked about the lawsuit on Monday, an Nvidia spokesperson kept schtum. But Modulus Financial CEO Richard Gardner wasn’t so quiet. He said the lawsuit was “necessary to protect our brand, which resulted from decades of hard work and investment.”
Modulus Financial, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, has provided financial software to big names like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs since 1997. They reckon they’ve “become widely recognised for their leadership and innovation — including within the field of AI,” and they incorporate AI technology into their software.
Nvidia has become one of the biggest companies in the world thanks to the widespread use of its chips to power AI technology. Its Modulus software is an open-source framework for developing machine-learning models for AI systems.
In 2021, Nvidia changed the software’s name from SimNet to Modulus. But Modulus Financial wanted more than that. They said the new name infringes on their earlier “Modulus” and “Modulus AI” trademarks.
Modulus Financial is seeking significant damages from Nvidia and an order for Nvidia to cease using the ‘Modulus’ name. If successful, this could have far-reaching implications for Nvidia’s use of the Modulus name and AI software.
It is not as if the word does not have a “common” use. It has several meanings in mathematics. It could refer to a number’s absolute value, the positive square root of the sum of the squares, or a constant factor or ratio.
