AI Backbone — Geographic Atlas of Machine Intelligence

A glowing blue Earth at night with North America lit by data-center networks

A deep-zoom atlas mapping the global AI supply chain — fabs, data centres, and mineral sources — over an interactive world map.

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AI Backbone · 2026

A portrait of the physical substrate that artificial intelligence runs on. What we now experience as ambient intelligence is, in fact, geographically concentrated and physically immense.

Four proxies of the AI backbone

The image is a composite of four geospatial datasets — each one a different physical layer of the same infrastructure. Together, they trace where compute is built, fed, and connected.

Terrestrial optical fibre

The luminous filaments threading the continents. National and inter-city backbones move bits at the speed of light through hair-thin glass — the nervous system that connects every data centre to every user.
Submarine cables

Roughly 600 systems crossing the seafloor, carrying ~99 % of intercontinental internet traffic. The cables are the only path between the model and the user when an ocean lies between them.
Data centres

The brightest knots in the image. Hyperscale and AI-cloud campuses concentrate gigawatts of power and millions of GPUs at a few thousand sites worldwide — the places where electricity becomes computation.
Chip fabrication plants

Semiconductor foundries, packaging plants, and memory fabs — the upstream factories that grow the silicon, etch the transistors, and stack the HBM that every AI accelerator depends on.

Sources

AI supply-chain nodes

tier 1 / 2 / 3 bottleneck

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