Sisvel hires Qualcomm veteran to lead new AI patent pools

The industrialization of AI is shifting the patent landscape from mobile devices to data center hardware. By establishing early pools for Ultra Ethernet and networking, Sisvel aims to prevent the fragmented, litigation-heavy licensing environment that historically burdened the smartphone industry. For the streaming ecosystem, this indicates a push toward more predictable costs for the high-performance computing backends that power transcoding and recommendation engines. Success here could lock in standardized licensing rates for the physical infrastructure underpinning global AI workloads before bilateral disputes stall deployment. Watch for the official list of founding licensors by early 2027 to gauge major silicon vendor buy-in.

The push for standardized AI hardware licensing comes as the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) expands its influence over data center networking. Per an official UEC announcement in September 2024, the consortium added 40 new members including NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Lenovo, bringing its total membership to nearly 100 organizations. This growth underscores the industry's shift away from proprietary interconnects toward open, high-performance Ethernet-based stacks specifically designed to handle the microsecond-level latency requirements of AI training and inference workloads.

Sisvel's focus on structured pools aligns with broader momentum in the patent licensing market for emerging connectivity standards. According to ipfray reporting from June 2026, Sisvel’s Wi-Fi Multimode pool—which encompasses Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7—recently secured Microsoft as a licensee, joining other major implementers like Sony, HPE, and ASUS. This rollout was cited as a validation of the pool model’s ability to move beyond traditional telecommunications and into broader computing verticals.

Regulatory and judicial trends in 2025 also favored consolidated licensing models. Per LexisNexis IP analysis in December 2025, global standard-essential patent (SEP) royalty revenues reached approximately $35 billion in 2024, with projections suggesting $55 billion by 2028. This growth is increasingly driven by the 'standard-mapping' of patents to mandatory features in AI and 6G specs. As noted by Fish & Richardson in January 2026, courts in jurisdictions like the Eastern District of Texas continue to see high litigation volumes, pushing companies toward the transactional efficiency of patent pools to mitigate litigation risk and establish predictable FRAND (Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory) rates early in a technology’s lifecycle.