Amid surging capital investment for new fabs and mounting pressure to secure chip supply chains, the article examines how leading semiconductor companies manage ballooning patent annuity costs by reshaping their portfolios through strategic pruning across 12 major players, in a test set with US $4.3 billion in fees at stake. Very early on, it poses a pointed question drawn directly from the numbers: if objective patent-quality differences can be measured well before expiry, why do most organizations still wait more than a decade before trimming weaker assets from their portfolios?…