Honestly, I find it kind of wild that someone would spend a big chunk of their time at work trying to drag down someone else's work. Fine, if you really think that someone has done something egregiously fraudulent, then you probably should pursue it. But to spend so long working on a rebuttal to a paper which basically boils down to "Well your benchmarks aren't good enough" is pretty weak. I've spent a lot of time looking at research papers - the benchmarks are always weak.

Also, if you're actually interested in writing a paper on "What are the best techniques for place and route" then write a paper "Best Modern Place and Route algorithms" not "Here's why this particular paper my colleagues wrote is wrong".

Personally, I think they should've published his paper - they can continue actually using the work internally to improve their TPU designs whilst he publicly tries to persuade their competitors it's a bad idea.