Terra Silica

I recently learned about Pax Silica and WAICO, and wondered how much capacity WAICO actually has.

It doesn’t look like a great data set exists for China’s AI capabilities; the best I could find in general were Epoch AI’s, but they seem to be very incomplete for China. Their latest data set, AI Data Centers, puts WAICO at roughly 5% of global AI compute,1 while an earlier entry, GPU Clusters, had WAICO at 9%.2 Chinese official sources, on the other hand, claimed over 30% of global capacity in mid-2025.3 Whether they’re inflating the numbers is anyone’s guess, but the difference is striking.

In any case, I wanted to see the numbers on a map, and vibe-coded Terra Silica: a visualization of the geopolitical distribution of AI compute. It’s an Astro website that uses MapLibre GL to render the world map, with some hacks for compressing geometry data so it loads fast. I intend to keep Terra Silica up to date if better data sets come along, but it relies on Epoch’s data in the meantime.

  1. Epoch AI, AI Data Centers ↩

  2. Epoch AI, GPU Clusters ↩

  3. People’s Daily Online ↩