Amazon Web Services, the world's largest cloud-service provider, owes $525 million to tech firm Kove for infringing on its data-storage patents, an Illinois federal jury ruled on Wednesday.

The jury found that AWS violated three Kove patents, which included technologies that Kove said had become "essential" to Amazon's cloud computing arm's capacity to "store and retrieve massive amounts of data."

Representatives from Amazon did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the ruling. Courtland Reichman, Kove's main attorney, described the ruling as "a testament to the power of innovation and the importance of protecting IP rights for start-up companies against tech giants."

In 2018, Chicago-based Kove filed a lawsuit against Amazon in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The corporation claimed in the complaint that it pioneered technology for high-performance cloud storage "years before the advent of the cloud."

Kove claimed that AWS's AmazonS3 storage service, DynamoDB database service, and other products infringed on cloud storage patents. On Wednesday, the jury agreed with Kove that AWS infringed all three Kove patents at issue, but rejected Kove's claim that AWS violated its rights knowingly.

AWS has refuted the charges, claiming that the patents were invalid. On the other hand, Kove also sued Google last year for violating the same patents in a separate Illinois litigation that is currently pending.