April 10 (Reuters) - Amazon.com's ( AMZN ) Amazon Web

Services, the world's largest cloud-service provider, owes tech

company Kove $525 million for violating its patent rights in

data-storage technology, an Illinois federal jury said on

Wednesday.

The jury determined that AWS infringed three Kove patents

covering technology that Kove said had become "essential" to the

ability of Amazon's ( AMZN ) cloud-computing arm to "store and retrieve

massive amounts of data."

Representatives for Amazon ( AMZN ) did not immediately respond to a

request for comment on the verdict. Kove's lead attorney

Courtland Reichman called the verdict "a testament to the power

of innovation and the importance of protecting IP rights for

start-up companies against tech giants."

Chicago-based Kove sued Amazon ( AMZN ) in the U.S. District Court

for the Northern District of Illinois in 2018. The company said

in the lawsuit that it pioneered technology enabling

high-performance cloud storage "years before the advent of the

cloud."

Kove alleged that AWS' Amazon S3 storage service, DynamoDB

database service and other products infringed the cloud-storage

patents. The jury agreed with Kove on Wednesday that AWS

infringed all three Kove patents at issue, though it rejected

Kove's contention that AWS violated its rights willfully.

AWS had denied the allegations and argued that the patents

were invalid.

Kove also sued Google last year for infringing the

same patents in a separate Illinois lawsuit that is still

ongoing.