TACITUS consulting map methods

Prepared 11 November 2026. These are dated, source-based research samples, not live inventories or client findings.

1. The energy geography of compute

Metric: estimated share of worldwide data-centre electricity consumption in 2024. The IEA reports United States 45%, China 25% and Europe 15%. Rest of world is calculated as 100 − 45 − 25 − 15 = 15%. The highlighted 85% is the sum of the three published rounded shares.

Source: International Energy Agency (2025), *Energy and AI*, published 10 April 2025, executive summary. https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/executive-summary . Report and licence: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai . Licence: CC BY 4.0. Licence conditions: https://www.iea.org/terms/creative-commons-cc-licenses . TACITUS created the map; the IEA has not endorsed it.

Encoding: circle area, not radius, is proportional to the published percentage. Circle centres are approximate geographic label anchors, not facilities, city locations or estimates of within-region density. Europe is retained as the source's aggregate; its value is not assigned to individual countries. The rest-of-world residual is shown separately. Unmarked geography does not mean zero use. Country borders are context only, with no numerical shading.

Coverage and limits: all data-centre workloads plus cooling and other supporting equipment. Electricity use is a measure of energy footprint, not installed IT capacity, AI-specific capacity, GPU stock, FLOPS, utilization, or available cloud capacity. Equipment efficiency and workload mix vary. The percentages are rounded estimates and should not be used to compute precise TWh values. No forecast has been mapped. Only the openly licensed executive-summary figures are used: the report's separately licensed Annex A capacity tables are not used.

Decision use: identify regions for further energy, regulatory and supplier due diligence. Two cloud-region names do not by themselves establish independent power or jurisdiction exposure; this map cannot establish either at facility level.

2. The geography of chip fabrication

Metric: share of global 200mm-and-larger commercial semiconductor fabrication capacity in 2022, using the source's 300mm-equivalent wafer-start normalization. Exhibit 7 reports mainland China 24%, Taiwan 18%, South Korea 17%, Japan 17%, United States 10%, Europe 8%, and other locations 7%. These rounded source figures sum to 101%; they have not been renormalized. The source excludes capacity below 5,000 wafer starts per month and wafer sizes below 8 inches.

Additional annotation: Exhibit 6 reports the 2022 share of logic fabrication capacity below 10nm as Taiwan 69% and South Korea 31%. This is a different technology-specific denominator from the main map. It is a historical baseline, not a claim that these shares remain unchanged today. Exhibit 6 additionally excludes R&D fabs.

Source: Boston Consulting Group / Semiconductor Industry Association (May 2024), *Emerging Resilience in the Semiconductor Supply Chain*, Exhibits 6 and 7, printed pages 14 and 15. Underlying sources: SEMI and BCG analysis; Exhibit 6 also cites the US Department of Commerce. Official report: https://web-assets.bcg.com/57/d1/ad16a66b41f5a178aca9274ca36f/emerging-resilience-in-the-semiconductor-supply-chain.pdf . SIA report page: https://www.semiconductors.org/emerging-resilience-in-the-semiconductor-supply-chain/ .

Rights: the source report is copyrighted and no open commercial reproduction licence is asserted. This is an original map of a small set of attributed factual figures, not a reproduction of the report's charts, maps, text, or page design. Do not redistribute the source PDF or screenshots as TACITUS assets. No source logos are used and no endorsement is implied.

Encoding: published country shares are joined by Natural Earth ADM0_A3 codes: CHN, TWN, KOR, JPN and USA. Fills represent 10–<15%, 15–<20% and ≥20%. Europe and other locations remain aggregate rows and are not assigned to countries. Grey means not disaggregated for this map, not zero. No zero-valued country observations are plotted. The East Asia inset enlarges small geographies without changing their values.

Coverage and limits: capacity is not output, sales, ownership, leading-edge AI accelerator supply, packaging capacity, supplier dependence or the full semiconductor supply chain. Broad country figures do not establish a particular product's fabrication route. No 2032 forecasts from the report have been presented as observed data.

Decision use: investigate shared geographic bottlenecks behind nominally different vendors. A real procurement assessment requires product, foundry, node, packaging, site and substitution evidence.

Cartography and reproducibility

Basemap: Natural Earth 1:110m Admin 0 Countries, version 5.1.2, public domain. Download: https://naturalearth.s3.amazonaws.com/110m_cultural/ne_110m_admin_0_countries.zip . Terms: https://www.naturalearthdata.com/about/terms-of-use/ . The dataset's de facto boundary treatment is used for geographic reference without a position on sovereignty or boundaries.

The geographic layers were joined, projected, simplified and clipped using QGIS 3.40.6 (PyQGIS). Projection: Equal Earth, EPSG:8857. The final web SVGs use those projected geometries with accessible text and a purpose-built layout. PNG fallbacks are rendered from the same SVGs. The accompanying QGIS project preserves editable source layers and two native QGIS layouts; its native layout styling is simpler than the polished web artwork. Keep the QGZ and GeoPackage together.

Checks: input sums verified (electricity 100%, all-fab rounded shares 101%, sub-10nm logic 100%); all five country codes match once; no missing values are recoded as zero; both PNG exports visually inspected at 1400 × 820; SVGs have a title, description and no external resource requests. No map screenshot from another publisher is used.