Anaqua study finds AI is redefining semiconductor innovation

The semiconductor industry is being transformed, and artificial intelligence (AI) is the driver. Anaqua, a leading provider of innovation and intellectual property (IP) management technology and services, today released key findings from its 2026 Semiconductor Industry Patent Report: AI & Innovation Trends. It is an analysis of global patent activity over the last five years that reveals a market experiencing a significant change. Overall semiconductor patenting grew 78% over the last five years. Patents at the intersection of AI and semiconductors grew 114% – nearly 40% faster. AI isn’t merely influencing chip innovation; it defines it at every layer of the stack, across chip architecture, graphics processing units (GPUs), inference processors, and custom accelerators for hyperscalers, among other industry segments.

“Semiconductors are the foundation of the technology industry, and their advances unlock entire new categories of innovation,” said Toni Njim, Chief Product Officer at Anaqua. “We set out to measure exactly how much AI is driving that foundation forward, and the answer is clear: AI isn’t just influencing semiconductor innovation anymore. It’s defining it, and the scale of that impact is astounding.”

Using Anaqua’s AcclaimIP patent analytics platform to analyze more than 700,000 AI-related filings, the report traces AI’s reach into nearly every layer of chip design and provides a competitive map. AI has become a significant organizing force behind where semiconductor research investment and patent filings are directed.

Some of the report’s key insights

• IBM leads where the science is hardest, topping AI-semiconductor crossover filings with 794 and analog AI with 389. Its footprint concentrates in frontier technologies: quantum computing, neuromorphic chips, and phase-change memory that encodes neural-network weights directly onto the chip, claiming roughly 14 times better energy efficiency and now reaching commercial deployment through its Spyre accelerator.
• Long anchored in on-device and edge AI, Qualcomm now ranks #9 in inference chips (655 patent filings, notably with none granted five years ago) and shows some of the steepest growth in the report, up 186% in AI architecture (252 filings), with a rising GPU position (#4, 134 filings).
• At first glance, NVIDIA’s patent footprint looks modest compared to its market dominance, and the reason is strategic. The company holds 49 GPU-titled semiconductor patents, ranking seventh, and sits at #15 in inference chip patent filings. Its durable advantage lies elsewhere – in the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) software ecosystem it introduced in 2006. Its moat is code, not silicon.
• Samsung is converting its memory position into broad AI-hardware leadership. It leads AI architecture patenting with 1,194 filings, leads high-bandwidth memory (HBM) with 107, and ranks second in both inference and analog AI, spanning neural processing units (NPUs), processing-in-memory (PIM), and its Exynos system-on-chip (SoC) line.
• Intel is positioned across the stack. It leads GPU semiconductor patent filings with 188, ranks second in AI-in-integrated-circuit architecture with 967 filings, and places among the leaders in HBM, analog ICs, and inference chips.
• China dominates AI inference patenting. Government-affiliated entities – universities, national labs, and state research institutes – lead inference and accelerator filings with 5,387 patents over five years, far ahead of Samsung’s 1,897 patent filings in second place, and rank third in GPUs, with startups such as Moore Threads and Muxi emerging.
• The hyperscalers have become silicon designers. Patenting tied to Alphabet/Google’s tensor processing unit (TPU) and Microsoft’s Maia accelerator appears across nearly every AI-and-semiconductor intersection – evidence of cloud giants designing custom chips for their own workloads rather than buying off the shelf, a shift quietly changing who controls AI hardware.

Anaqua’s Semiconductor Industry Patent Report is based on an analysis of 713,755 total semiconductor-related filings over the latest five-year period, including more than 174,000 in the most recent 12-month period alone. The report was generated using data from Anaqua’s AcclaimIP patent analytics platform, accessed between May and June of 2026. All queries were executed via the AcclaimIP Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector, enabling direct programmatic access to the full patent database. For a free copy of the report, click here. 

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