This could mean Waymo will probably not be able to announce anything significant until then: Uber would suffer from having such a big rival step up. Internal politics at Alphabet must be fun.
It doesn't mean Alphabet thinks the stock won't lose value, it means that they think that it won't lose enough value to be worth less than what they could have gotten in cash, either in a settlement or (discounted for risk and time, and netted against the expense of continuing) from taking the lawsuit to it's conclusion.
> This could mean Waymo will probably not be able to announce anything significant until then: Uber would suffer from having such a big rival step up.
Is $245 million really worth any significant risk to Alphabet’s position in self-driving cars? I suspect they’d accept the risk to the value of the Uber stock to maximize their own future prospects in that market.
They've already got a business that's spinning off tons of cash, so they have no need for money, and instead, are pursuing any possible avenue that has the potential of making $$$ (e.g. all of the other bets).
Presumably it's possible there are settlement terms having to do with the use/disuse of certain trade secrets, but we may never know.