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I am trying to get a sense of how centralized computational power is in the world, e.g. are there a few big companies and organizations that own majority of computational power in the world?

For the sake of this questions, let's define computational power as something like the number of basic floating-point operations (addition/multiplication/...) that can be performed (or something similar) as used in comparison of different CPUs/GPUs.

I am not looking for exact numbers, but a general sense of the distribution. Something like Amazon is estimated to own 20%, or 20% is at the hands of owners of smartphones, etc.

Other related measures like electricity consumption, CO2 emission, number of CPUs/GPUs, number of transistors, or similar data linked with the scale of computational power would be also helpful.

Kaveh
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  • There is some statistics for the supercomputers: https://www.top500.org/ . AFAIK, there is no statistics for all computers in the world. Such statistics would be very hard to get in practice (at least a precise one). That being said most web servers run on Amazon servers. The GAFAM own most of the cloud&web servers of the world and a significant part of the computational power (ignoring supercomputers). As for the CO2 emission, this is a complex topic since one need to define if the physical material needs to be included in it (including mining and related things recursively)... – Jérôme Richard Mar 04 '22 at 22:25
  • I know it is hard to come up with statistics. I want to get a sense of the situation, i.e. I am looking for engineering approximations, back of the envelope estimates, any sources of data that might be useful, etc. – Kaveh Mar 05 '22 at 17:53

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