'AI Accelerators' as Core Corporate Competitiveness... Annual Patent Applications Increase by 15%

IP5 Patent Application Status Data in the Field of Artificial Intelligence Accelerators. Provided by the Korean Intellectual Property Office

[Asia Economy (Daejeon) Reporter Jeong Il-woong] As artificial intelligence accelerators emerge as a core competitive advantage for big tech companies, the competition to secure patents for related technologies is intensifying.

According to the Korean Intellectual Property Office on the 18th, artificial intelligence accelerators are technologies applied to dedicated hardware for implementing and executing artificial intelligence. Currently, they play a key role in the AI industry within the hardware domain alongside software areas such as machine learning and deep learning.

For the same reason, patent applications related to AI accelerators by companies have recently been increasing sharply. In fact, patents related to AI accelerators filed in the top five intellectual property countries (South Korea, the U.S., Japan, China, and Europe) from 2011 to 2020 show an average annual growth rate of 15%.

Especially, since the development boom began with the match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, patent applications related to AI accelerators over the past five years (2016?2020) have increased at an average annual rate of 26.7%, which is steeper than before.

The distribution of patent applicants by nationality for AI accelerators (2011?2020) shows the U.S. accounting for the largest share at 45% (2,255 cases), followed by China at 23.1% (1,156 cases), South Korea at 13.5% (677 cases), Japan at 10.1% (504 cases), and Europe at 5.3% (267 cases).

When dividing the total number of applications by major countries into five-year periods, the number of applications from 2016 to 2020 was on average 3.4 times higher (1,129 cases → 3,879 cases) than from 2011 to 2015.

Patent application status by applicant nationality in the field of artificial intelligence accelerators. Provided by the Korean Intellectual Property Office.

In particular, by the same standard, South Korea's patent applications related to AI accelerators increased 7.5 times (80 cases → 579 cases), surpassing the average growth rate of major countries.

The number of applicants in South Korea also increased 3.8 times on average (23 applicants → 88 applicants), which is higher than the major countries' average of 2.8 times (243 applicants → 685 applicants).

This indicates that domestic research and development (R&D) in the AI accelerator field is actively progressing, and the Korean Intellectual Property Office expects this trend to continue in the future.

The ranking of companies worldwide by the number of AI accelerator-related patent applications is as follows: Intel with 438 cases (8.7%), Samsung Electronics with 272 cases (5.4%), Cambricon with 262 cases (5.2%), IBM with 158 cases (3.2%), and Google with 151 cases (3.2%).

When ranking only domestic companies, Samsung Electronics holds a firm first place, followed by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) with 58 cases, SK with 45 cases, StradVision with 30 cases, and Seoul National University with 27 cases.

Park Jae-il, head of the AI Big Data Examination Division at the Korean Intellectual Property Office, said, “As we enter the era of superintelligence, the importance of ‘AI accelerators’ that enable AI to learn and reason quickly is emerging, and competition to secure technological leadership is intensifying. For South Korea to increase its influence in the AI field, it is necessary to secure core patents for foundational technologies such as AI accelerators.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.