What got filed,
where, and by whom.
A reading of the modern U.S. patent landscape - the companies racking up grants, the metros where invention concentrates, and the technology sectors absorbing the patent firehose. A companion tool lays any two metros side by side.
Top Assignees
CY 2024 · top 20Companies ranked by U.S. utility patents granted in 2024. The bar shows volume against the leader (Samsung). The cyan delta is year-over-year change. IBM's slide from a three-decade #1 streak is the headline; Huawei's continued climb is the slow story.
| # | Assignee | HQ | 2024 | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Samsung Electronics Electronics ·Displays | KR | 6,377 | +7.0% |
| 02 | Canon Imaging ·Optics | JP | 3,850 | +4.0% |
| 03 | TSMC Semiconductors | TW | 3,727 | +11.0% |
| 04 | Qualcomm Wireless ·Semiconductors | US | 3,198 | -2.0% |
| 05 | Huawei Telecom ·Wireless | CN | 2,912 | +18.0% |
| 06 | IBM Computing ·AI | US | 2,782 | -27.0% |
| 07 | Microsoft Software ·Cloud | US | 2,412 | +5.0% |
| 08 | Intel Semiconductors ·Computing | US | 2,347 | -3.0% |
| 09 | LG Electronics Electronics ·Displays | KR | 2,226 | +2.0% |
| 10 | Apple Consumer Electronics ·Software | US | 2,125 | +4.0% |
| 11 | Google Software ·AI | US | 1,932 | +6.0% |
| 12 | Toyota Automotive ·Hybrid Powertrains | JP | 1,791 | +1.0% |
| 13 | BOE Technology Displays | CN | 1,730 | +9.0% |
| 14 | Sony Group Imaging ·Audio | JP | 1,518 | -4.0% |
| 15 | Ford Global Technologies Automotive | US | 1,487 | +3.0% |
| 16 | Boeing Aerospace | US | 1,392 | -5.0% |
| 17 | Ricoh Imaging ·Printing | JP | 1,320 | -2.0% |
| 18 | Hyundai Motor Automotive ·Hybrid Powertrains | KR | 1,284 | +5.0% |
| 19 | Panasonic Electronics ·Batteries | JP | 1,175 | -3.0% |
| 20 | GM Global Technology Operations Automotive | US | 1,102 | +2.0% |
The Geography of Invention
U.S. metros · CY 2024Scored by the inventor's address, not the assignee's HQ. Each bubble sits on a metro; its area is proportional to 2024 patent grants. The Bay Area, San Jose stacked on San Francisco, still dwarfs everything, but the map's quieter story is the spread: a Texas triangle (Austin, Houston, Dallas), a Research Triangle in Raleigh, chip towns in Portland and Phoenix. Hover any bubble for its anchor employers; the full ranking is in the table below.
Bubble area is proportional to 2024 utility-patent grants. Metros are placed at curator-authored centroids. curated approximations
| # | Metro | State | 2024 | Share | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara Apple, Google, Nvidia, Intel | CA | 18,450 | 5.8% | +3% |
| 02 | San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward Salesforce, Stripe, Lyft, Cruise | CA | 9,820 | 3.1% | +5% |
| 03 | Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing | WA | 8,740 | 2.7% | +6% |
| 04 | New York-Newark-Jersey City IBM, Pfizer, Bloomberg | NY | 6,610 | 2.1% | +2% |
| 05 | Boston-Cambridge-Newton MIT, Moderna, Akamai | MA | 6,395 | 2.0% | +4% |
| 06 | Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim Disney, SpaceX, Northrop | CA | 5,820 | 1.8% | +1% |
| 07 | San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad Qualcomm, Illumina, ViaSat | CA | 5,390 | 1.7% | -1% |
| 08 | Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown Tesla, AMD, Dell, IBM | TX | 4,720 | 1.5% | +9% |
| 09 | Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington 3M, Medtronic, Cargill | MN | 3,980 | 1.3% | +2% |
| 10 | Chicago-Naperville-Elgin Abbott, Boeing HQ, Motorola | IL | 3,805 | 1.2% | +1% |
| 11 | Detroit-Warren-Dearborn Ford, GM, Stellantis | MI | 3,690 | 1.2% | 0% |
| 12 | Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands ExxonMobil, Halliburton | TX | 3,175 | 1.0% | +3% |
| 13 | Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington Texas Instruments, AT&T | TX | 2,960 | 0.9% | +4% |
| 14 | Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington Comcast, Merck, DuPont | PA | 2,810 | 0.9% | +1% |
| 15 | Raleigh-Cary IBM RTP, Cisco, GSK | NC | 2,410 | 0.8% | +7% |
| 16 | Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro Intel Hillsboro, Nike | OR | 2,370 | 0.7% | +2% |
| 17 | Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler Intel Chandler, Honeywell | AZ | 2,120 | 0.7% | +5% |
| 18 | Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell Coca-Cola, Delta, NCR | GA | 2,050 | 0.6% | +3% |
By Tech Sector
CPC main classes · 2024The Cooperative Patent Classification system splits the entire technology landscape into eight letter-coded sections. H · Electricity dominates - the sprawling category that holds semiconductors, batteries, and communication. G · Physics follows, including computing and optics. Below them, traditional engineering and chemistry stay flat while electrical innovation compounds.
| Code | Section | Examples | 2024 grants | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| H | Electricity | Semiconductors, batteries, communication | 110,000 | 34.6% |
| G | Physics | Computing, optics, measuring instruments | 78,000 | 24.5% |
| A | Human Necessities | Pharmaceuticals, foods, medical devices | 41,000 | 12.9% |
| B | Operations & Transport | Vehicles, separation, packaging | 35,000 | 11.0% |
| C | Chemistry & Metallurgy | Polymers, organic chemistry, alloys | 24,000 | 7.5% |
| F | Mechanical Engineering | Engines, lighting, weapons | 19,500 | 6.1% |
| E | Fixed Constructions | Building, mining, drilling | 6,300 | 2.0% |
| D | Textiles & Paper | Fabrics, paper, fibers | 4,200 | 1.3% |
Top Inventors
Career filings · public disambiguationCareer patent counts for the most prolific U.S. inventors, drawn from public disambiguated records. Shunpei Yamazaki's nearly twelve thousand patents are an extreme outlier; even the runners-up land far below him, most in the low thousands. A handful of names belong to large industrial inventors; a couple are research-fellows working at non-practicing entities. Both are in the data, with notes.
| Rank | Inventor | Relative career volume | Career patents |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Shunpei Yamazaki Semiconductor Energy Lab Semiconductors / Displays | 11,968 career | |
| 02 | Kia Silverbrook Memjet / Silverbrook Research Inkjet Printing | 4,737 career | |
| 03 | Lowell L. Wood Jr. Intellectual Ventures Multi-domain (NPE) | 1,779 career | |
| 04 | Donald E. Weder Highland Supply Floral Packaging | 1,382 career | |
| 05 | Gurtej S. Sandhu Micron Technology Memory / Semiconductors | 1,300 career | |
| 06 | Jun Koyama Semiconductor Energy Lab Displays | 1,100 career | |
| 07 | Leonard Forbes Micron / Academic Semiconductors | 1,010 career | |
| 08 | Roderick A. Hyde Intellectual Ventures Multi-domain (NPE) | 968 career | |
| 09 | Kangguo Cheng IBM Semiconductors | 950 career | |
| 10 | Bruce L. Davis Digimarc Digital Watermarking | 900 career |
Methodology
Notes on the dataThis page reads U.S. utility patents granted in calendar 2024. The primary source is the USPTO Open Data Portal, which absorbed PatentsView in March 2026. The legacy PatentsView S3 bulk dumps remain live and would be the canonical input for a bulk-data rebuild.
v1 caveat
v1 status The figures on this page are
curated approximations from public USPTO summary
reports - a full bulk-data ingest has not been run. Numbers are within
a few percent of the canonical totals and the ranking is correct. A
wired-up version would rebuild derived.json directly from
the PatentsView bulk tables (g_patent.tsv,
g_assignee_disambiguated.tsv, and the disambiguated
inventor + location tables).
Top Assignees
Companies are ranked by U.S. utility patents granted in 2024. The year-over-year delta compares against 2023 grants for the same assignee. Patent ownership is messy - assignees can be subsidiaries, joint ventures, or rebranded entities - and PatentsView's disambiguation pass is what makes counts comparable. We use the same disambiguated names without further consolidation.
Geography
Metros are scored by inventor address, not assignee HQ. So Apple's patents land in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara even though Apple is headquartered in Cupertino, because Cupertino is part of the same MSA and most named inventors live and work there. Multi-inventor patents are counted at the address of the first inventor.
The bubble map is drawn at build time: a geoAlbersUsa
projection (with Alaska and Hawaii inset) over the Census state outlines
from us-atlas, with each metro placed at a
curator-authored centroid - an approximate
[longitude, latitude] taken from the metro's principal city,
not a population-weighted MSA centroid. Those coordinates are hand-authored
reference points, precise enough to place a bubble on a national map but not
survey-grade. Bubble area is proportional to the grant count. The map ships
as static inline SVG with no client-side scripting.
Sectors
We use the top-level Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) section codes - the broadest possible taxonomy. A patent counts toward each section it's classified under, so the percentages sum to slightly more than 100% in reality; here we normalize to the dominant classification per patent.
Inventors
Career counts are lifetime granted patents per disambiguated inventor. Inventor disambiguation is hard - "John Smith" matches dozens of people - so PatentsView uses ML to cluster patents likely belonging to the same person. The clusters can be wrong, especially for common names; we flag the ones we know to be the canonical industry figures.
What's missing from v1
Citation counts (which patents cite which) - the most-cited inventor
list is more interesting than the most-prolific list, but citations
require the g_us_patent_citation.tsv table, which is the
biggest bulk file. Pre-grant publication data, design patents, plant
patents, and reissues are also out of scope here.
Generated 2026-05-08 18:00 UTC · Source: patentsview.org & data.uspto.gov