Luxembourg AI, Powered by NVIDIA

NVIDIA will be working on a national collaboration with the country of Luxembourg to help power Artificial Intelligence initiatives for the small European Grand Duchy. Check out the article, "Luxembourg AI: Powered by NVIDIA?" published recently by the Computer Business Review.

There are two obvious data points to take a look at here - NVIDIA and the country of Luxembourg.

NVIDIA has been active in AI technology development for many years. At least one application dates as far back as 1996, "System and method for selecting a color space using a neural network". Later filings, within the last half-dozen years or so, have turned to technologies including: power regulation using fuzzy logic, video classification with deep neural networks, and neural network accelerators.

Although NVIDIA will be working with Luxembourg on this collaboration, the majority of its AI related patent filings occur in only a few jurisdictions - US, Germany and China.

Luxembourg as a country is an interesting case for patent filings. The small country managed to work its way into the top 25 jurisdictions for AI filings. Most of the filings come from American, German, Japanese and French patent ownership.

Taking a look at the top 10 AI technology patent filers in Luxembourg, we see a diverse mix of players:

• Siemens

• Microsoft

• Digimarc

• Philips

• Roamware

• Universal Electronics

• Honda

• Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives (CEA)

• Fotonation

• Sony

This is an interesting distribution of industrial, software, electronics and automotive companies. I was expecting to see a high concentration in finance and financial services related technology and companies. While those do exist, there is certainly broader reach in these Luxembourg AI patent filings and patent owners.

Side Note: Luxembourg is what we call a "non-examining jurisdiction." This means that patent applications filed must meet formality requirements, but will be granted regardless of whether they meet the statutory novelty, inventive step and industrial applicability standards. Luxembourg is also a European Patent Organisation member state, allowing validation after receiving a grant from the EPO. In contrast to the local route, patents validated in Luxembourg out of the EPO will have certainly undergone the rigor of a full examination. Even with this local option to get a granted patent application without having to undergo examination, not even 1% of AI-related LU applications (roughly 3 in 1000) are filed this way, with most coming through the EPO.