The geography of AI firms

Kumar Rishabh and Vatsala Shreeti

No 1343, BIS Working Papers from Bank for International Settlements

Abstract: In this paper, we trace the geography and economic characteristics of firms that produce artificial intelligence (AI) products and services. Many economies around the world are evaluating their strategic priorities in AI, yet relatively little is documented about the global distribution of AI production. We construct a new database that identifies 1,246 AI-producing firms across 32 economies. We map these firms in each economy into the five layers of the AI supply chain: compute, cloud and related infrastructure, data tools, AI models and AI applications. The biggest markets for AI production are China and the US. Most economies specialise only in a few supply chain layers and many focus largely on compute. AI firms in all economies exhibit strong home bias in investment activity, with a focus on downstream applications. Finally, we find that venture capital inflows are strongly correlated with the presence and density of AI firms in a given economy.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; AI supply chain; firm geography; AI measurement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 F23 L16 L86 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ain, nep-bec and nep-tid
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bis:biswps:1343

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