Blog

• The AI Chip Race Peaked in 2022. The Race That Replaced It Is About Packaging, Power, and Plumbing

  Ten years of USPTO data show the generative-AI hardware bottleneck rotating down the stack: neural-accelerator filings peaked in 2022 and are falling, while advanced packaging rose every year, power-conversion patents V-turned with datacenter demand, and liquid-cooling grants grew 4.8x — each layer owned by a different set of companies.

• NVIDIA Won the Generative AI Boom With the Emptiest Patent Vault in the Room — Then Started Re-Arming

  Twenty years of USPTO data on NVIDIA: granted patents fell to an 11-year low of 155 in 2020 — behind AMD, 18x behind Intel — exactly as it won the AI hardware market. Then a quiet 7x filing ramp that began years before ChatGPT, an unusual share of it kept secret until grant, culminating in a record 567 grants in 2025.

• A Tax Company Out-Patents Google on Generative AI, Banks Out-File NVIDIA — and OpenAI Barely Files at All

  GenAI-titled US patent filings grew 27x in three years — but the leaderboard is software companies and banks, not chipmakers or AI labs. Intuit is #2 overall, JPMorgan and TD Bank each out-file NVIDIA, finance out-files the twelve biggest chipmakers 4:1, and OpenAI's entire patent portfolio is ~78 documents.

• Samsung Never Blinks, TSMC Is Coming, and IBM Just Walked Away: Inside 1.8M Electricity Patents

  Ten years of USPTO grant data for CPC classes H01–H05 (semiconductors, circuits, power, communication): 1.8M patents, and a top-10 assignee leaderboard full of drama — Samsung's metronome consistency, TSMC's climb into second place, Qualcomm's V-shaped comeback, and IBM's 86% exit from the biggest patent category there is.

• While IBM's Patents Fell 76%, Its AI Patents Grew 57% — and Became Its #2 Category

  Ten years of USPTO grant data for IBM, broken down by primary CPC class: a topline 76% collapse from a 2019 peak and a −91% wipeout in semiconductor patents, but one category — AI/ML — grew through the whole decline to become IBM's second-largest granted-patent class by 2023.

• Semiconductor Patents Are Stuck Behind a Backlog That Built Up Years Ago

  A follow-up dig into why CPC class H01L (semiconductor) pendency nearly doubled since 2018: the entire increase is in the queue before a first office action. Examiners aren't slower and cases aren't harder — semiconductor filings outpaced examining capacity for several years starting around 2017, and the resulting backlog stock is still being worked down today.

• Patents Are Taking Longer to Grant Again — Especially in Semiconductors

  A ten-year analysis of 13.6M+ USPTO records shows median time-to-grant hit a pandemic-era low in 2021, then climbed back to a decade high by 2025 — with semiconductor patents (CPC class H01L) hit hardest, nearly doubling from 22 to 37 months.

• Draft Builder Now Reads Your Drawings, Not Just Your Words

  Draft Builder's AI now reads sketches and diagrams alongside your description, treating what a drawing shows as disclosed and generating a Brief Description of the Drawings automatically — a first for AI-assisted patent drafting.