Payden & Rygel: Share of global AI compute by country
This week, Nvidia, the world's most valuable company and a leading semiconductor designer, reported a 56% year-over-year increase in revenue for Q2 2025. Days before Nvidia's earnings release, the U.S. government also announced that it had taken a 10% equity stake in Intel, another American semiconductor company.
What explains interest from investors and the federal government? 'Compute is the new crude oil', and significant shifts have already taken place in the industry, with private AI compute ownership worldwide rising from 40% in 2019 to 80% today.
When defined in terms of AI compute a country possesses, the U.S. dominates with a 72% share of global AI compute capacity, while China is the only other nation with a double-digit share, at 16%. However, the hardware required to generate computing power, namely semiconductor manufacturing, remains global, with Taiwan's TSMC still the undisputed leader. If continued private and public sector support can ramp up advanced chip production in the U.S., future U.S. dominance in both computing capacity and semiconductor manufacturing may be possible.