Where the agent economy is built
Every supplier in the corpus placed by headquarters, not just the hardware supply chain: agents, models, companies, cloud and the memory/tools layer. The US concentrates the value-capture layers; the deepest hardware dependencies sit upstream with Taiwan (TSMC) and Korea (HBM).
Every supplier placed by headquarters, and what that geography reveals about leverage
The world map shows where the ecosystem physically sits: fabs, data centres, headquarters and the routes between them. Concentration is the immediate read.
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Each layer concentrates differently. Fabrication is the narrowest, energy is regional, and company formation is broader but still clustered. Where those layers do not overlap is where supply risk lives, and it is a slower map to change than any other in the corpus.
Where are most AI companies based?
The United States, by a very wide margin, and disproportionately in the San Francisco Bay Area. It holds the layers where value is captured: frontier model labs, hyperscale cloud, and chip design.
Which countries matter most in the AI supply chain?
Beyond the US: Taiwan for leading-edge chip manufacturing, South Korea for high-bandwidth memory, the Netherlands for lithography machines, and Japan for specialist materials and equipment. Each is a genuine chokepoint rather than just a large market.
Why does Taiwan matter so much for AI?
Because TSMC, based in Taiwan, fabricates almost all the leading-edge chips AI runs on. Companies elsewhere design them; Taiwan makes them. There is no quick substitute, since a new leading-edge fab takes years and tens of billions.
Where are AI data centres being built?
Wherever power is cheap and actually available. That has pushed buildout towards regions with spare grid capacity, and increasingly towards sites with their own generation, because connection queues in established markets run to years.
Does it matter where an AI company is headquartered?
For the law, yes. Headquarters decides which export controls, privacy rules and disclosure requirements apply to it. Where the compute physically runs is a separate decision, and the two are often in different countries.
Is Europe competitive in AI?
Partly. Europe has strong research, a few serious model labs, and the world's only advanced lithography supplier in the Netherlands. What it lacks is compute capacity and the scale of capital behind the US labs. Its main lever so far has been regulation.