Who is delivering?
Ranked by the furthest delivery stage T2C can verify — not by announced capacity or share price. Ties are broken by the earlier evidenced date, then by ticker.
The physical race behind AI
Follow AI from atoms to revenue.
See who supplies what, where the bottlenecks are, what has actually shipped—and when infrastructure starts earning.
Play the AI Time Machine Five campaigns, 34 real turning points, fictional capital. Educational only.
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Materials
the physical ingredients everything else is made of
Happened
7 node types mapped, no supplier record
What is this?
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Wafers
the discs that chips are printed on and then cut out of
Happened
6 node types mapped, no supplier record
What is this?
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Chips + HBM
the compute engine, with its fast memory bolted alongside it
Happened
10 node types mapped, no supplier record
Specialty processes · Compute silicon and systems
What is this?
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Photonics
it replaces electrical data movement with beams of light
7 suppliers
2 with a confirmed award
What is this?
7 suppliers on file
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AI Factory
the data centre, from empty field to running machines
23 sites
6 operators tracked
Power · Cooling and thermal · Facility and construction · Operators
What is this?
23 sites on file
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Accepted
the customer has checked it works and agreed to take it
2 sites
Formally accepted by a customer
What is this?
2 sites on file
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Revenue
the operator can finally record the money
2 operators
Have disclosed billing capacity
What is this?
2 operators on file
Every megawatt now billing depended on materials, wafers, chips and optics that were certainly made — you cannot bill for compute that was never built. T2C maps the whole chain, 43 node types across 10 stages, and holds sourced supplier records at the delivery end: the optics, the operators, the sites and the billing. Upstream is mapped and described without a supplier record, and says so rather than claiming one. How the chain is tracked
What happens at each stage
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Materials Not tracked
Copper, substrates, rare earths and steel are mined and refined into the components everything downstream is built from.
Miners and refiners sell to component makers.
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Wafers Not tracked
A foundry grows silicon ingots, slices them into wafers and prints circuits onto them, before they are cut into individual dies.
Foundries sell fabrication capacity to chip designers.
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Chips + HBM Not tracked
Dies are packaged with high-bandwidth memory stacked beside them, then assembled into accelerator boards. This is usually the headline bottleneck.
Chip designers and memory makers sell accelerators to server builders.
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Photonics Tracked by T2C
Lasers and optical transceivers move data between racks fast enough that thousands of accelerators behave as one machine.
Optics makers sell transceivers to network and server builders.
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AI Factory Tracked by T2C
An operator secures power, builds the halls, energises them and installs the equipment. This takes years and is where most announced capacity stalls.
Operators sell capacity to the companies training and running models.
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Accepted Tracked by T2C
The customer tests the delivered capacity and formally accepts it under the contract. Acceptance is the milestone that normally starts the revenue clock.
The customer signs off; the operator has delivered.
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Revenue Tracked by T2C
Billing begins once the contract's conditions are met and the operator discloses it. Acceptance and billing are different stages and T2C never assumes one proves the other.
The operator is finally paid for the megawatts.
Checking what changed…
The AI buildout today
Next big catalyst
Q4 2026
Guided window
NBIS Nebius year-end 5 GW contracted-power target
A guided window is a period the company named, not a deadline. It is never shown as an exact date.
Promise vs reality
IREN
Announced or potential
5 GW
Verified current stage
50 MW
Different evidence stages or measurement bases. These figures are shown side by side and are not subtracted.
Why should I care?
Delivery is the thing a contract cannot guarantee. T2C tracks each operator from announcement to billing and shows which gate the evidence actually supports, so a signed agreement is never mistaken for revenue.
- What has been accepted by a customer, not merely contracted.
- Where a guided window has moved, and by how long.
- Which figures rest on a primary document and which are second-hand.
The constraint on AI is no longer only chips. It is power, land, grid connections and the years it takes to turn any of them into a hall a customer will accept.
- Announced gigawatts are measured at the fence; usable compute is measured in the hall.
- The gap between the two is the story, and it is measured in years.
- 3 of the tracked sites carry a dated change in the last quarter.
A data centre is an electrical project before it is a computing one. Securing power, connecting to a grid and energising a site are separate gates that can each take years, and T2C tracks them separately for that reason.
- Gross utility power is what a site draws at the connection.
- Critical IT load is what reaches the computing equipment — always the smaller figure.
- T2C holds no sourced record of any named project's energy mix, water use or local employment, so it makes no claim about them.
Choosing a lens changes the explanation only. It never changes, filters or recalculates a research figure.
Megaprojects to watch
All 23 sites →
Acceptance
IREN · United States
Horizon 1 (Childress)
- Customer
- Microsoft
- Capacity
- 50 MW
- Next gate
- Billing
High evidence — 4 of 4 gates confirmed
Open project record →Illustrative image; not site evidence.
Billing
WULF · United States
Lake Mariner, New York
- Customer
- Not disclosed
- Capacity
- 438 MW
- Next gate
- All tracked stages complete
High evidence — 5 of 5 gates confirmed
Open project record →Illustrative image; not site evidence.
Power secured
KEEL · United States
Panther Creek, Pennsylvania
- Customer
- Not disclosed
- Capacity
- 350 MW
- Next gate
- Construction
High evidence — 4 of 5 gates confirmed
Open project record →Illustrative image; not site evidence.
60-second explainer
How an AI data centre makes money
- Electricity reaches the site.
- Cooling and power systems support the computing equipment.
- Servers run customer workloads.
- The customer tests and accepts the contracted deployment.
- Revenue begins when the contract's billing conditions are met and disclosed.
Step 1 of 5. Press start to step through.
Acceptance and billing are different stages. T2C does not assume one proves the other.
Educational illustration; stages and architecture vary by project.