Machine Intelligence Infrastructure

• Play — animates the supply chain building up layer by layer, from raw materials to AI, with connections drawing in as each stage appears.
• Labels — toggle node names on the map.
• Connections — links stay hidden by default to keep the map legible; hover or click any node to reveal just its connections, or toggle Connections to show every dependency at once.
• Flow — animates link directions to show the direction of material and data flow.
• Chokepoints — pulsing red rings mark stages where a single company or region controls most of global supply.
• Top 20 Risks — highlights the twenty highest-risk nodes by composite fragility score (see the Risk model section below).
• Cables — submarine fiber-optic cables carrying ~99% of international internet traffic.
• Data Centers — the 96 frontier AI data centres in Epoch AI’s Frontier Data Centers hub (CC BY 4.0), the same set as the Build-out view and refreshed with it every month. A diamond’s area is proportional to its IT power today; paler diamonds are not yet running. Click one to open it on the Build-out timeline.
• Stories — eight amber pins on places where a single dot tells a big chunk of the chain (Carajás, Spruce Pine, Mariupol+Odesa, Bayan Obo, Dammam, Abilene Stargate, Kolwezi, Veldhoven).
• Crowded places — zoomed out, hubs that share a region gather in a small flower, with raw materials at its heart and AI on its rim. Hover to open it up and pick a hub. As you zoom in, each dot glides to its true location and stays there; hubs at the same address remain side by side, tied to their shared spot by a hairline.
• Sites — ~400 real-world locations the chain actually runs on (fabs, plants, mines, R&D offices, HQs), colored by chain layer. Click any site to open its parent node.
• Chip Tiers — the three country tiers of the US Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion (90 FR 4544, 15 January 2025). Tier 1 is the United States and the 18 partners in Supplement No. 5 to Part 740; Tier 3 is Country Group D:5 plus Macau; Tier 2 is everyone else. The Department of Commerce withdrew the plan on 13 May 2025, two days before compliance was due, so the Tier 2 quotas never applied. Its text was never formally removed and still sits in the regulations (15 CFR 740.27). The Tier 3 bans were not new: they come from the October 2022 and October 2023 advanced-computing rules (87 FR 62186, 88 FR 73458) and remain in force. Hover a country for what has changed since, such as the UAE’s licence-free access from July 2026 and Cambodia leaving the arms-embargo group in February 2026. Tier sizes in chips are RAND’s conversions (Heim, PE-A3776-1).
• Diversion Cases — routes of AI chips allegedly sent to China without a US licence, drawn only where a court filing names the route, as published by the US Department of Justice: one guilty plea (Hao Global, Houston, 2025), two indictments (Tampa via Malaysia and Thailand, 2025; City of Industry via Malaysia and Singapore, 2026) and one criminal complaint (El Monte via Singapore and Malaysia, 2025). Line weight shows how far the case has gone. An indictment or complaint is an allegation, and every defendant is presumed innocent unless proven guilty; case status is as published on the date checked (11 November 2026). Where a filing names a country but no city, the line ends at the capital. We do not draw press reports, investigations without charges or allegations by private parties. Singapore’s February 2025 server case is left out because it was charged as fraud against suppliers, and the Singapore government said it is unrelated to US export controls. Since 14 July 2025 Malaysia requires its own Strategic Trade Permit to export or transship US AI chips. Renting computing power abroad is a different matter from moving chips, and is often legal; the Data Centers layer shows who Epoch AI identifies as each site’s users.
• Export Controls — highlights nodes subject to US, China, Japan, or Dutch export controls.
• Edge Types — recolors links by what flows through them: material, equipment, design-IP, power, data, or service.
• Search — type any node name in the search box at the top of the panel.
• Dotted terms — underlined acronyms in node descriptions have inline definitions; hover to read them.

Pick a material and watch it travel from origin to your screen. The map dims everything else and highlights only the nodes and links on that single chain.

• Full AI Chain — the entire path from raw materials to AI services.
• Quartz → Chips — Spruce Pine, NC quartz becomes silicon ingots and then wafers.
• Sugar → GPUs — Brazilian sugarcane becomes ABF film inside NVIDIA GPUs.
• Neon → Chips — Ukrainian steel mills supply the neon gas inside EUV lasers.
• Tin → Light — molten tin droplets, vaporized 50,000 times per second, create the EUV photons that print chip circuits.
• Water → Chips — 10 million gallons a day, purified to parts-per-quadrillion.
• Germanium → Internet, MSG → AI, Sand → Internet, Copper → Cloud, Steel → Power, Chinese Chain.

Each chain node is an aggregate. Toggle Sites to see the 394 individual fabs, plants, mines, R&D offices, and HQs that aggregate up. Sources: SemiAnalysis Global Fabs Database (161 fabs), GLOBAÏA-curated manual sites (214), and HQ fallback for the rest. Dots are colored by their parent layer.

This is the view to switch on if a node like NVIDIA or ASML feels too “Silicon Valley.” You'll see the actual geography — Israel, India, Singapore, Taiwan, Germany — that the headline name hides.