AWS made 90.8 billion in 2023. I think a $525 million charge for using a smaller company's intellectual property reflects exactly what you're saying.
If IP was more important then the lawsuit probably would've gathered more than half a percent of Amazon's revenue for something that was '"essential" to the ability of Amazon's cloud-computing arm to "store and retrieve massive amounts of data."'
AWS didn't steal the technology. They re-invented it in a way that was similar to a patented technology. Imo this is a failure of the patent system. AWS should not have to pay anything in an ideal system.
If IP was more important then the lawsuit probably would've gathered more than half a percent of Amazon's revenue for something that was '"essential" to the ability of Amazon's cloud-computing arm to "store and retrieve massive amounts of data."'