Compute, Capital, Chips, Code
Where AI is made, funded, powered, staffed and governed. Live World Bank research indicators joined with Stanford AI Index model counts, Epoch AI release history, SEMI foundry capacity, IEA data-centre energy, MacroPolo talent flows and the 2023-2025 global policy timeline.
The Compute Race
Stanford AI Index counts "notable" ML models — those with ≥100M parameters or comparable compute. The US leads on absolute count; China leads on year-over-year growth. Everyone else is a smaller order of magnitude.
Model Releases
Every notable frontier LLM 2018-2025, plotted by release date and training compute. The step-function from GPT-3 (2020) to GPT-4 (2023) captures the scaling-hypothesis era. DeepSeek-R1 (Jan 2025) proved the open-weight Chinese labs could keep up.
Patents Frontier
World Bank IP.PAT.RESD tracks resident patent applications. China's domestic patent surge post-2011 is one of the largest quantitative shifts in the entire economic-indicator library — even if quality-adjusted counts are less lopsided.
Chip Manufacturing
The AI compute stack runs on a physical bottleneck. TSMC alone runs 68% of global leading-edge wafer capacity. Everything on this page — model training, inference, agent workloads — flows through a handful of fabs in Taiwan, South Korea and the US.
AI Investment
Stanford AI Index private-market investment. The US pulled away from everyone else after ChatGPT: $109B in 2024 vs China's $9.3B and the EU's $8.9B combined.
Energy Footprint
IEA projects data-centre electricity to more than double 2024→2030 — from ~550 TWh to ~1,450 TWh. Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft have collectively signed for >20 GW of nuclear capacity to keep up.