The map

The map draws cloud regions with published GPU prices inside the current hold window, coloured against GPUQuant's reference prices, alongside sourced facility records and company relationships. This page states what each mark is and what it is not.

To publish the map on your own site, see Embed the map. It covers the JavaScript and iframe forms, colors, filters and interaction permissions.

A region is an area, not a point#

A cloud region has no published boundary, so the map draws each one as the area its provider actually names, and nothing tighter than that: a built-up area where the provider names a city, a state where that is all it names, a country where that is all it names. How precisely a region is known decides how it is drawn, and that precision genuinely differs: AWS names a city, Microsoft often names only a state, Google varies. Countries are shaded as jurisdictions, markers are regions, and a region marker never claims to be a building.

The place a provider names is not where its hardware sits. Google names Columbus for us-east5, and its three documented Ohio campuses are in New Albany, in Lancaster roughly thirty miles away, and on the far south side of Columbus; none of the three falls inside the built-up area the map draws there. Capacity is absent for the same reason: no provider publishes how many GPUs a region holds, so nothing here estimates it.

What the colour means#

Colour is distance from the reference price for that GPU, fixed at 40 percent below in green and 40 percent above in red. The scale does not move, so green means the same thing whichever GPUs are selected. For each visible region, the map averages the selected GPU prices as ratios to their reference prices after the price-range filter. An area's colour is based on the mean of those region values; opening it lists the surviving providers and GPU prices. The offerings drawn are the ones the benchmark consumes, read over the same hold window as the aggregates, so a provider that has not republished this month is shown at its last published price rather than missing.

Two regions with no area#

Two Azure regions, southcentralus2 and southeastus, are priced but do not appear in Microsoft's public region list. There is no area to draw for them and a guess would be worse than the gap, so they are absent from the map while remaining in every figure the benchmark computes.

The facility layer#

The second layer marks individual sites: datacenters, the fabs, packaging plants and equipment makers without which GPU compute would be different, and since 11 September 2026 the headquarters, R&D campuses and assembly plants of every company in the graph, and U.S. datacenters first found in the EPA's permit registry and then researched to a primary source. A facility never touches the price surface. It takes no colour from the scale, contributes to no average and is not counted among the regions in an area, because most facilities have no published price and never will.

• Every fact is sourced. A facility record carries a URL, a publisher, a retrieval date and the sentence that supports each claim, and a record with no source cannot be written. Nothing on a facility page is prose a model wrote; it is rendered from the record.
• An outline is drawn only where one is recorded. A building with a traced outline is drawn as that outline, attributed to OpenStreetMap under its licence. A site recorded at campus precision, where an operator named a campus rather than a building, is drawn as a point, because a polygon there would be an invention.
• A missing facility is visibly missing. Where a site could not be placed on the right building it stays unplaced rather than drawn on the wrong one.

Relationships between companies#

Selecting a site draws its operator's relationships as lines to the nearest building of each counterparty on the map: the rest of the company's own sites, who it sells to, who it buys from, and who owns or holds a stake in it, or what it owns and holds. A line is between two companies and is drawn between one building of each. It is never a route.

• One sentence names both parties. Every relationship rests on a single sentence on a page that was fetched, most often a party's own filing or announcement. A script checks that the sentence is on the page, and a separate review checks that it supports the relationship in the direction claimed.
• An investment means equity. Investors and investments are drawn in gold. A warrant, an option or a loan is not recorded as one, and each company's page tells control apart from a minority holding.
• What was refused is deliberate. Partner programmes, memoranda of understanding, joint development and announcements of future offerings are not relationships here.

AI clusters#

An AI cluster runs in a datacenter, so it is shown as one. Every site in Epoch AI's data on GPU clusters and frontier AI datacenters was researched to the building it runs in, which is a datacenter record like any other, or matched to a record already on the map. The record's page lists the clusters inside it with Epoch's figures: chips, H100 equivalents, power, owner and users, credited to Epoch and reproduced under its Creative Commons Attribution licence. A power figure is marked as estimated where Epoch calculated it from the hardware or from satellite imagery. A cluster Epoch places only in a country, with no owner, has no building to show.

Power#

The map draws no power plants. It drew all 16,230 in the United States for a day, and that was the whole American grid, of which a few dozen have anything to do with AI, drawn over one country on a map of the world. Power belongs in figures on the pages instead. GPUQuant holds the U.S. plants from the Energy Information Administration's Form 860, which is public domain, and a company page lists the plants under that company's own name.

What the map does draw is the power a source ties to a building: an agreement between two companies, such as a utility contracting its output to a cloud, is a relationship line like any other. No public source says which plant serves which datacenter, and nothing here suggests one does.