Epoch AI

Epoch AI describes itself as a data-first research nonprofit investigating the future of AI ¹. Its public dataset of large AI data centres is an example of remote detection of data centres:

• Epoch's Frontier Data Centers Hub identifies chillers and cooling towers in satellite images and corroborates them with permits and public disclosures to infer each facility's power capacity ². It then estimates the compute installed, in H100-equivalents ².
• At its launch in November 2025 the hub tracked 13 large US data centres ². Epoch estimated that they held about 2.5 million, or about 15%, of the roughly 15 million H100-equivalents delivered to customers worldwide in the preceding several years ². The data are released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence ².
• By September 2026 the database still mostly covered US sites, and Epoch estimated its coverage of global deployed AI computing capacity at 44% (90% CI 24–81%) ³.
• A Federation of American Scientists report on tracking AI data centres with satellite imagery draws on the hub, to which its author contributed ⁴. An AI 2040 supplement on covert AI projects names Epoch's methods among those that intelligence services could use to locate AI data centres that are not specifically concealed ⁵.