Follow the money through the AI boom.
Every part of the AI economy, from the power station to the app on your phone. Who is making money, who pays whom, and the gaps still open for a business like yours.
- Layers
- 9
- Areas
- 25
- Companies
- 241
- Money flows
- 62
- Openings
- 89
Ask anything about the AI economy.
Answers come straight from the map's research: 241 companies, 62 money flows and 25 areas, with every company it names linked.
You pay $20 a month for ChatGPT or Claude. Where does it go?
Scroll down and watch it split, stop by stop, until it reaches the power station.
- The AI lab$8.00
- The cloud$2.00
- The building, cooling and cabling$3.40
- Server makers and other parts$1.70
- Nvidia$3.00
- TSMC and the chip factories$0.70
- The memory makers$0.50
- The power station$0.70
A rough model of costs, not a traced payment. Built from Epoch AI's data centre cost model, Nvidia's filings and reported lab and cloud margins, October 2026.
The AI lab
$8.00The company behind the chatbot keeps about $8 for its people, research and sales. The other $12 goes straight out the door to rent computing power.
The cloud
$2.00The cloud that rents out the computers keeps about $2 as profit. Renting AI chips is a thinner business than most people think.
The building, cooling and cabling
$3.40About $3.40 pays for the data centre itself: the shell, the cooling, the high-speed network that ties thousands of chips together, plus staff, upkeep and tax.
Server makers and other parts
$1.70About $1.70 goes to the firms that assemble the servers and make everything in them that is not an Nvidia chip: processors, network cards, power supplies, racks.
Nvidia
$3.00About $3 is pure profit for Nvidia. Of all the stops, it keeps the most for the least: a chip that costs about $6,400 to make sells for $30,000 to $40,000.
TSMC and the chip factories
$0.70About 70 cents goes to the factories that actually print the chips and stack them into packages. Almost every advanced AI chip in the world comes out of TSMC in Taiwan.
The memory makers
$0.50About 50 cents goes to the three companies that make the ultra-fast memory stacked beside every AI chip. Demand is so high it is sold out a year ahead.
The power station
$0.70Last stop: about 70 cents for electricity. It sounds small, but it is the part nobody can make more of quickly, which is why power is now the bottleneck for the whole boom.
The lesson: the further down the stack, the fewer players and the fatter the cut per player. One chip company keeps more of your $20 than every cloud combined.
The whole AI economy, one stack.
Every part of the AI industry, from the power stations at the bottom to the firms that put AI to work at the top. Each area shows how big it is, who is making money, where the money flows, and the openings by size: ones a small business could take, ones that need venture money, and ones only giants can play. Click any card for the detail and sources.
Services and skills
29 companiesApps
45 companiesTools and platforms
45 companiesRunning models (inference)
40 companiesData and models
45 companiesCompute clouds and the money behind them
31 companiesData centres and networking
26 companiesChips
30 companiesEnergy and power
23 companies
Who pays whom.
Every line is a real, sourced payment between two companies on the map. Pick a company to see its customers and its suppliers.
Hover or tap any dot. Lines run from the company paying to the company being paid, and the bigger the dot, the more connected the company.
From ChatGPT's launch to today.
Press play and watch the money pour into each layer, year by year, with the moments that moved it.
Nvidia fiscal years end in late January of the following year. 2022 is FY2023 (ended Jan 2023), 2023 is FY2024, 2024 is FY2025, 2025 is FY2026 (ended Jan 2026). 2026 would be FY2027, not yet reported, so it is null. The FY2023 figure of 15.0 is implied from the 217% growth Nvidia reported for FY2024, not read directly.
Combined capex of the four companies, calendar years (Microsoft reports to June, so its figure is its fiscal year). The 2025 figure of about 410 is an actual total from a press summary. The 2026 figure of about 725 is the sum of company plans reported during 2026, and those plans were revised through the year. The 2022 to 2024 combined totals are null because the Alphabet and Amazon figures could not be fetched from their investor pages. Partial figures on each company's own basis: Microsoft additions to property and equipment for fiscal 2022, 2023 and 2024 were 23.9, 28.1 and 44.5 billion (years to June). Meta capex including finance lease principal was 32.0 billion in 2022, 28.1 billion in 2023 and 39.2 billion in 2024. The two bases differ, so they are not summed here.
Menlo Ventures, State of Generative AI in the Enterprise. The 2023 and 2024 figures come from the 2024 edition. The 2025 edition reports a much larger total (about 37) but its 2023 base differs (about 1.7), and no link to that edition was captured, so 2025 is null.
Crunchbase global AI startup funding by calendar year. 2023 is described as close to 50. The 2025 figure is from Crunchbase's year-end 2025 article, though a later Crunchbase summary gives about 212, so treat 2025 as approximate. The 2024 figure comes from a Crunchbase listing page and should be checked against the article.
- January 2026Microsoft reports more than 4.7 million paid GitHub Copilot subscribers, up 75% on a year earlier.source
- February 2026Nvidia reports fiscal 2026 data centre revenue of $193.7 billion, up 68%.source
- February 2026OpenAI's annualised revenue passes $25 billion.source
- April 2026Anthropic's annualised revenue run rate reaches $30 billion.source
- July 2026The four largest US cloud and platform companies plan about $725 billion of AI capital spending in 2026, up from about $410 billion in 2025.source
- July 2026Bloomberg reports Anthropic's run rate passed $65 billion, a figure the company has not confirmed.source
- September 2026OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra on 4 September 2026, which it describes as artificial general intelligence.source
The suppliers getting rich from the boom.
They sell to the AI builders, not to you. They get paid whoever wins.
Designs its own Trainium AI chips and rents them out through AWS.
5% of AI chip supply (Epoch AI)
Open profileHosts and fine-tunes open AI models on rented GPUs for companies.
About $1B annualised (Sacra estimate, Feb 2026)
Open profileDesigns the GPUs that train and run most big AI models, and the CUDA software they run on.
$89.0B data centre revenue in the quarter to July 2026 (fiscal Q2 2027), out of $96.2B total
Open profileDesigns custom AI chips for big clouds and AI labs, and the networking chips that link them.
AI chip revenue $16.7B in a quarter, up 221%
Open profileMakes very large single-chip AI systems built for fast answers from models.
$510M in 2025, with $87.9M net income
Open profileMakes switches, routers and AI networking systems sold to cloud providers and enterprises.
About $4B of AI infrastructure revenue in fiscal 2026 (year to July 2026)
Open profileThe largest GPU-only cloud, renting Nvidia chips to AI labs and big tech on long contracts.
Quarterly revenue $2.6B, up 112%. $104B backlog. Still loss-making
Open profileBuilds AI servers from Nvidia and AMD chips for enterprises, clouds and governments.
Full-year fiscal 2027 guidance raised to $192B (Sep 2026)
Open profileMakes switchgear, transformers and power distribution equipment that sit between the grid and the server hall.
Record revenue of $8.5B in Q2 2026 (quarter to 30 June 2026)
Open profileResearchers check every number against a public source, and every figure carries its date. Estimates are marked. Updated 18 Oct 2026.
A deep dive into one area lands three times a week, and what it finds goes onto the map.
Numbers move fast in this market. Ask the map about anything, and tell us when a figure is out of date.
The map updates three times a week.
241 companies across 25 areas, 62 money flows and 89 openings so far. New research lands every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
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