Anaqua: AI Drives Surge In Semiconductor Patenting
KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 2 (Bernama) -- Anaqua has unveiled key findings from its 2026 Semiconductor Industry Patent Report: AI & Innovation Trends report, revealing a market undergoing structural transformation, driven significantly by the demands of artificial intelligence (AI).
The report, an analysis of global semiconductor patent activity, found that while overall semiconductor patenting grew 78 per cent over the last five years, patents at the intersection of AI and semiconductors grew 114 per cent, nearly 40 per cent faster.
Anaqua, in a statement, said AI is increasingly defining semiconductor innovation at every level of the technology stack, across chip architecture, graphics processing units (GPUs), inference processors and custom accelerators for hyperscalers.
Using Anaqua’s AcclaimIP patent analytics platform to analyse more than 700,000 semiconductor patent filings, the report shows AI’s influence on nearly every layer of chip innovation. The data was accessed between May and June 2026.
According to the report, a closer examination of key semiconductor subcategories across the AI landscape shows that AI is driving an outsized impact on the chip market and has become a primary force behind semiconductor research and development (R&D) investment and patent filings.
The report also found that NVIDIA’s patent footprint may appear smaller relative to its market dominance because its competitive advantage lies outside hardware. NVIDIA holds 49 GPU-titled semiconductor patents, ranking seventh, and ranks 15th in inference chips.
IBM tops AI-semiconductor crossover filings with 794 and analogue AI with 389, with a footprint concentrated in frontier technologies, including quantum computing, neuromorphic chips and phase-change memory that encodes neural-network weights directly onto the chip.
China dominates AI inference patenting by a significant margin and is rising rapidly in GPUs. Chinese government-affiliated entities lead inference and accelerator filings with 5,387 over five years, far ahead of Samsung’s 1,897, spanning universities, national laboratories and state research institutes.
The report also found that hyperscalers have become silicon designers. Alphabet/Google’s tensor processing unit (TPU) and Microsoft’s Maia accelerator-related patenting appear across nearly every AI-and-semiconductor patenting intersection, reflecting a shift towards cloud giants designing custom chips for their own workloads rather than buying off the shelf.
-- BERNAMA