The surge is being driven by competition to establish intellectual property positions before the quantum technology industry settles on common technical standards. Technologies adopted as standards will be required in virtually all future quantum systems, meaning firms holding patents over them could earn royalty income from competitors for decades. The prospect of commercially viable quantum computers arriving around 2030 has sharpened the urgency.
Mathys & Squire's analysis of global filings shows quantum communications patent applications rose 35% to 899 and quantum sensing applications rose 10% to 205 over the same period. IBM filed the largest number of quantum computing patents last year at 1,300, well ahead of Google at 150, Quantinuum at 97, Microsoft at 90, PsiQuantum at 79 and Bank of America at 70. The UK filed 153 quantum computing patents against 4,234 filed in the United States.
So-called standard-essential patents, which grant mandatory licensing rights when a technology is designated a common standard, sit at the centre of the strategic calculus. Firms that have not secured patent protection risk seeing their technologies adopted as standards without any intellectual property claim in place, a position that could cost them significant royalty income over the next three to four decades.
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