Austin American-Statesman
Mark Matson for American-Statesman ( 6/3/16) AMD is located at 7171 Southwest Parkway.
Austin American-Statesman
The promise of AI boom billions has spurred fights in Austin courtrooms and federal agencies over allegations of corporate chicanery by a pair of companies apparently angling for bigger pieces of the pie.
Monolithic Power Systems Inc., which provides technology used in high-speed computing, filed suit in federal court alleging that its competitor Vicor Corp. has been waging a campaign of fear and intimidation through earlier court filings — and may have used a former employee to gain confidential data while working in a client’s lab.
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Vicor “has tried to compete” by supplying its technology to Monolithic’s customers, it says, “but has not been successful doing so.”
The lawsuit in U.S. District Court is the latest action in a corporate feud that now spans two federal lawsuits, a state District Court case, an International Trade Commission investigation and a U.S. Customs and Border Protection proceeding as both companies attempt to hitch their wagons more closely to global chip-making behemoth AMD.
California-based AMD has had several blockbuster quarters in recent years, including a near 40% increase in revenue in the first quarter of 2026. Demand for its products soared along with the global boom in artificial intelligence, and both Vicor and Monolithic want their components used in building those products.
AMD did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did attorneys for Vicor and Monolithic.
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Austin is not home to either company. Monolithic is headquartered in Washington state and Vicor in Massachusetts, but the alleged illegal deeds were done in the Texas capital city.
The Austin connection
That’s where Derek Lee and AMD’s Austin lab come in.
Monolithic says it hired Lee away from Vicor last July in San Jose, Calif. He requested to be moved with his family to Austin so he could work directly with AMD, the company says in court records. After he moved, he was in AMD’s local lab almost every day.
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Shortly after starting, the new complaint says, Lee began accessing confidential data that didn’t have to do with his job.
That led to Vicor suing Monolithic early this year for allegedly infringing its patent on power converters it included in systems for AMD, Monolithic said. Vicor filed a complaint with the International Trade Commission and attempted to get Customs officials to stop products with Monolithic’s converters in them, including AMD AI accelerators, from entering the country.
Monolithic calls Vicor’s complaint spurious. It accuses its adversary of using incorrect, but confidential, data to build its case. It said Vicor is conflating the specifications of a never-released power converter with one it built for AMD. It alleges Lee gave Vicor a sample converter.
The same month as the complaint, Monolithic claims, Lee began downloading more data to his company laptop computer. He resigned Jan. 28 and said he was moving back to California.
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Monolithic says a forensic investigator went to his house to retrieve the laptop. The company also asked to image his iPhone to ensure no company information remained there, but Lee declined.
It wanted to look because it alleges that, in the 48 hours before he resigned, Lee downloaded more than 80 gigabytes of company data. An affidavit from a forensic investigator says Lee’s phone and several USB drives were connected to the device throughout his tenure at the organization, implying that data was transferred to them.
“Notably, however, (Monolithic) does not allege in the petition, (1) that any purported trade secret information was transferred from Lee’s MPS-issued laptop to any external device,” Lee’s attorney said in court records. Later filings from Monolithic say Lee transferred data related to AMD products via Bluetooth in one instance and sent himself data via Gmail in another.
It also alleged Lee never moved his family to Austin and never intended to.
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“The timing of Lee’s employment and the filing of the lawsuit suggests that Vicor encouraged Lee’s actions in order to obtain information that Vicor could use for its own litigation and business advantage,” Monolithic says in its federal lawsuit.
It sued Lee individually in state District Court in February for trade secret misappropriation and sought an injunction to prevent him from sharing any confidential data.
A pawn in the feud?
Lee denied the allegations, saying he didn’t misappropriate anything and calling it a “bad-faith” claim.
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In court filings, Lee’s attorney portrays the engineer as a pawn in a larger feud between Monolithic and Vicor. He says Monolithic is using the case against Lee to get ammunition for its case against Vicor and has asked the court to make Monolithic specify what trade secrets he took.
“Since filing suit, MPS has not provided any specificity regarding the supposed ‘trade secrets’ in Lee’s possession forming the basis of its claim,” Lee’s attorney said in court filings.
Monolithic Power Systems filed its federal lawsuit against Vicor on July 7. While Lee is not a party to the suit, his name peppers the filing, expanding the allegations made in the suit against him.
It says Vicor’s actions or “willing” blindness has already caused Monolithic to lose business from AMD, which switched to alternative suppliers when Vicor attempted to stop its converters from entering the country.
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It also raises the possibility that Vicor may be developing something to rival its components in an attempt to supplant them as a vendor, or to extort through licensing deals.
Monolithic is alleging misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference for both existing and future business and deceptive practices. It is seeking unspecified damages for the lost business as well as an injunction against Vicor using its data, attorneys fees and damages.