# The map

> How the map draws a cloud region, what the colour means, and what the facility layer shows and does not show.

Updated 2026-09-06. Canonical: https://gpuquant.com/docs/map

The map draws every cloud region where a tracked provider publishes an on-demand price for a published GPU, coloured by that price, and a separate layer of datacenters and supply chain sites for which a sourced record exists. This page states what each mark is and what it is not.

## 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](https://gpuquant.com/docs/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. An area takes the colour of its cheapest offering, and opening it lists every provider selling there. 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, and since September 2026 the fabs, packaging plants and equipment makers without which GPU compute would be different. 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.