Patent hubs
The race to embrace AI is playing out on many levels: nation versus nation, company competing against company, billionaire business moguls one-upping one another. The contest is a marathon, but considering the pace of investment, it feels more like a sprint. How all of this shakes out is impossible to know at this point. Money is pouring into AI, but the profit picture remains hazy. One winner right now? Data centers—the massive computing farms that transport, process, analyze, house, and govern the tera, peta, exa, and zettabytes of information that run through their powerful systems. They’re not the most exciting component of the big AI picture, but they’re the backbone of this industrial revolution. With no end in sight to this data center rollout, IFI CLAIMS, the industry’s most trusted patent data provider, decided to examine the patents in the space to ascertain which companies and technologies are leading the way. Here’s what we found:
Data center-driven patents
A data point to consider when talking about the proliferation of data centers: Since 2021, the number of global patents mentioning the term “data center” in the title, abstract, or claims was 52,530 compared to 30,287 over the previous five years; for just U.S. patents, that number was 12,258, compared to 9,224–quite the jump. But even as technology has developed by leaps and bounds over the past quarter century, few would have guessed that data centers would become the hot topic that it is today. But the sudden appearance of ChatGPT in late 2022 supercharged the pace of development for artificial intelligence.
At first, meeting the demand for the AI goldrush picks and shovels (GPUs and their connections) required for training large language models was the first leg of the race. More recently, the market’s dialog and investment has turned toward the massive data centers that hyperscalers are building out in order to house the gargantuan infrastructure necessary to advance AI. This intensifying need for data centers has been showing up in the patents. Over the past five years, the growth rate in U.S. data center-related patent applications has climbed at a compound annual growth rate of 9.7%. Grants, meanwhile, have increased by a rate of 2.5% over the same period. Grants, of course, lag applications because their approval comes much later in the examination process. The fact that applications are growing at a much steeper rate suggests that there should be more data center grants on the horizon.
Data hierarchy
No company has benefited more from the data center boom than Nvidia. Nvidia supplies the hyperscalers, companies like Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft building these AI factories, with their powerful processing units, software, and networks. Just a few years ago, Nvidia’s FY22 first quarter revenue for its data center business segment was just over $2 billion, trailing its gaming segment revenue of nearly $2.8 billion. Today, the data center stream eclipses gaming. Nvidia’s latest quarterly earnings release last month announced data center revenue of more than $68 billion, up 20% from the previous quarter and 73% from the previous year. Nvidia’s gaming revenue in the same quarter? Some $3.7 billion.
With such mushrooming sales at stake, Nvidia has plenty of innovation to protect. Over the past five years, the company has been the top applicant for inventions that include data centers as part of the patent application. Nvidia filed 1,248 patent applications with the USPTO in the timeframe, followed by VMWare (521), Dell (361), Intel (275) and Microsoft (411). Among Nvidia’s filings: this application for optimizing computational graphs for visual scripting and this one for enriching datasets and for semantic data selection. Both are still pending.
As for granted patents over the period, virtualization tech company VMWare (now owned by Broadcom) comes out on top with 475 approvals, compared to Nvidia’s 441. Here is a recent VMWare grant for wide area network optimization in the cloud. And one from Nvidia for an intelligent data center.
Data factory applicant trends
Overall patent numbers for an entity provide a snapshot for a given area within a certain period of time. Patent trendlines within that framework furnish another viewpoint on the strength of a company’s innovation position. While VMWare has the most grants and the second-highest number of applications over the five-year period, the curve is headed downward on both fronts. Nvidia, meanwhile, shows applications and grants sloping sharply upwards. Dell, for its part, is a mixed bag. After a steep, multi-year climb on applications, it took a dive in 2025, falling 41% that year. Dell’s grants, on the other hand, have climbed steadily between 2023 and 2025, rising 75% over the past two years. Here is a Dell grant from late last year for a data center disaster recovery system. And another from Dell for controlling central processing units in order to decrease power consumption in a data center.
The tech network connecting data center patents
Inventions aren’t usually about one singular sensation technology. They’re generally comprised of a layering, sometimes a latticework, of existing technologies connected and utilized in new and unique ways. In general, inventions stand on the shoulders of inventions that have come before. Such is the case with data centers, which harness the power of computing and storage in circumstances that are too enormous to contain within a typical office. The area’s most prominent patent classification is program control units (G06F 9), or the devices that carry out instructions in a computing system. Protocols for network security, error detection, and maintenance of data switching networks—all the stuff of computing—also figure prominently.
Another major technology for data centers: computing arrangements based on biological models (G06N 3). This technology supports generative AI inventions because of its roots in deep learning. The rise of generative AI has led to the rise in data center buildout, so data center patents are often buttressed by this classification, such as this patent granted a year ago to Intel for dynamic accelerator selection technology. And this Dell patent for reducing the carbon footprint of data centers.
Top companies’ leading technologies
Six companies are leading the way in data center patent counts: Nvidia, VMWare, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, and Amazon. But when parsing their patents by the type of technologies they cover, a more intricate view into each company’s patent expertise emerges. Nvidia and Intel, for instance, are playing in the same technology fields. Which makes sense because both companies are competing in the chip space. Computing arrangements based on biological models are their chief technologies—an area, as we pointed out above, that is foundational to generative AI. Nvidia has 345 data center patents that claim that technology, such as this chat filtering patent using machine learning. Intel, the chipmaker finding its way back after years of market stumbles, has 95, as seen in this patent for an autonomous self-healing engine for platforms. Other technology areas that the two companies have in common: machine learning, image analysis, and image enhancement.
As for VMWare, Dell, Microsoft, and Amazon, program control units is a top technology area for all four. This patent from VMWare covers an extension of network control into the cloud, while this one from Dell for synchronizing shutdown in a server operating system are examples of how this technology is used in their patents. Error detection and data switching networks are also prominent in their data center patents, as found in these patents from Microsoft for data recovery for inaccessible memory cells and allocating workloads through programmable switches. In short, the patents from these companies are mostly centered around the nuts and bolts of the data centers, while the chip companies are chasing more of the hotshot tech.
Energy levels
Data centers are power hungry. According to the 2024 U.S. Data Center Energy Usage Report, more than 4% of total electricity consumption in the nation was eaten up by data centers. By 2028, consumption could rise to 12% of the pie. Hyperscalers are rushing to secure energy for their data centers. In January, Meta formed a partnership with TerraPower (a company started by Bill Gates) to develop nuclear sources that meet its growing need for energy. To power its data centers, Microsoft made a deal with Constellation to secure the nuclear energy from Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, expected to reopen in 2028 nearly 50 years after the 1979 nuclear meltdown, the worst in U.S. history.
Considering the increasing construction of data centers in the age of generative AI and their ensuing power needs, surely companies must be scrambling to patent their latest innovations for energy efficiency in the intersection of data centers and energy. But a scan of the patent applications over the past five years does not show heartening results. Natural gas innovations related to data centers came out on top with 113 patents, followed by solar (95) and wind (89). Nuclear came in at seven filings—just slightly ahead of coal.
Are batteries the answer then? Data centers must have 24/7 continuous power, so it’s challenging to rely completely on renewables. With inventions around energy sources and data centers so sparse, we conducted a search on batteries over the time frame which yielded just 92 patents. Baidu USA came out on top, followed by Microsoft and Bloom Energy. Perhaps companies will ramp up their energy innovations in the years to come. For the here and now, this is a patent from Microsoft using battery technology filed in 2022 for a system that adjusts pressure in an immersion-cooled data center. It was granted last year. And one from Google filed in 2023 for a data center power system integrated into fuel cell design, also granted last year. Batteries, in general, are a fast-growing technology as IFI found in its most recent list of Top 10 Fastest Growing Technologies. Still, when it comes to batteries and data centers, we’re in the nascent stages of this boom. If anything, it should accelerate innovation around energy efficiency and renewability; in the long run, perhaps many more patents will be coming through the invention pipeline.
Data centers in space?
Much of the energy used to power data centers is expended for cooling systems—some 40%, according to Deloitte. Such considerable power requirements have leaders in the industry looking for alternative ways to sustain these guzzlers. Elon Musk, for example, wants to launch data centers into space and power them with solar. China also announced recently that it would be launching AI data centers into space over the next five years. It’s all very complicated, so we won’t get into the details on whether or not it’s possible, but IFI decided to take a look at the patents to see what’s happening there. We found a total of 152 that have some sort of space element intersecting with data centers. Edge computing company Armada has the highest number of patents with 13, followed by Amazon (9) and Hughes (8). Not a whole lot at this point, but it’s not exactly science fiction either because here’s one from Intel, granted just last month, for a multi-orbit satellite data center. And another from Amazon, granted in 2024, for a satellite antennae ground station service system.
Putting data centers under the sea is more of a near-term endeavor. Last October, China launched a large-scale underwater data center in Hainan in an attempt to reduce energy consumption. Microsoft, as a side note, has also experimented with underwater data centers in the past. Here is its 2024 application (still pending) for an immersion-cooled data center system.
