GRID · THE WORLD, WIRED
The World, Wired
How the planet is powered — and the machines now eating the load. The same real-time engine as the Earth map, turned to energy infrastructure. The flagship layer is the live map of the world’s data centres: about 3,383 mapped sites across 107countries as the cool baseline of where data lives, with the largest disclosed AI campuses picked out and sized by megawatts — the surge of compute reshaping the electricity grid. Power plants, the transmission network and pipelines follow.
DATA CENTRES MAPPED3,383
TRACKED AI CAMPUSES60
FRONTIER POWER, TOTAL9,427 MW
The data-centre boom
Pulled back, the cool clusters show where the world’s data centres gather — densest across the United States and Europe. Picked out in a hot accent and sized by megawatts are the largest disclosed AI campuses, the new builds driving the load surge; the biggest single sites now rival a small city for power. United States alone holds around 1,145 mapped data centres. Tap any hot bubble for its operator, power, compute and cost.
What Grid covers
Generation, the wires that carry it, and the machines that draw it. Data centres and power plants are live now; the rest of the grid is being built out layer by layer.
LIVEData CentresEvery mapped data centre on Earth — about 3,400 sites from OpenStreetMap as the baseline of where the world\u2019s data lives, with the largest disclosed AI \u201Cfrontier\u201D campuses (Epoch AI) picked out and sized by megawatts: the hyperscale sites driving the electricity-load surge of the AI boom, tappable for operator, power, compute and cost.LIVEPower PlantsOperating power plants worldwide, coloured by fuel and sized by capacity — the living map of what generates the world\u2019s electricity, from the giant hydro dams and nuclear stations to the sprawling new solar and wind farms.LIVETransmission GridThe world’s high-voltage transmission backbone — 58,278 corridors at 300 kV and above, from OpenStreetMap: the long-distance lines that carry electricity from the power plants to the cities, drawn brighter and heavier the higher the voltage, from the 300 kV regional grid up to the 765–1,100 kV ultra-high-voltage super-grids.LIVESubstationsThe major switchyards where the grid meets — 6,271 transmission substations at 300 kV and above, from OpenStreetMap: the nodes where the high-voltage backbone joins, splits and steps between voltages on the way from the power plants to the cities. Drawn as squares in the same voltage colours as the transmission lines, so the wires and their junctions read as one skeleton.LIVEWind FarmsThe world’s wind farms — 11,211 wind power plants from OpenStreetMap, drawn as radar-green turbines sized by capacity: the renewables build-out made visible, from a single community turbine to the 10 GW Gansu base and the giant North Sea arrays (Hornsea, Dogger Bank). The biggest farms anchor the world view and the smaller ones reveal as you zoom in, so the picture never clutters.LIVESolar FarmsThe world’s utility-scale solar farms — ~16,000 solar power plants from OpenStreetMap, drawn as solar-gold suns sized by capacity: the other half of the renewables build-out, from community plants to the great desert parks — Bhadla and Pavagada in India, the Gulf mega-projects (Mohammed bin Rashid, Al Dhafra), Benban in Egypt, Tengger in China. The biggest anchor the world view and the rest reveal as you zoom in.LIVELNG TerminalsThe world’s LNG terminals — 128 liquefied-natural-gas import and export terminals from Wikidata, drawn as storage tanks coloured by what they do: ice-cyan terminals receive gas and turn it back from a liquid (regasification), ember-orange terminals chill gas to a liquid for shipping (liquefaction), and lilac terminals do both — the US plants built to import and re-tooled to export. The seaborne gas trade made visible: where gas leaves (Qatar, the US Gulf, Australia) and where it lands (Europe, Asia, India).LIVERefineriesThe world\u2019s oil refineries \u2014 728 refineries from OpenStreetMap, drawn as warm-copper distillation towers: where crude oil is turned into the fuels we actually use \u2014 petrol, diesel, jet fuel. The midpoint of the hydrocarbon chain, between the wells and crude pipelines that feed them and the products pipelines that carry the finished fuel away. Unlike the map\u2019s other OpenStreetMap layers this is genuinely global \u2014 the biggest clusters fall on the real refining powers: the US Gulf Coast, India, Russia, the Gulf states and China.LIVEEV ChargingThe world’s DC fast-charging network — 28,887 rapid-charging stations from OpenStreetMap, drawn as lightning bolts coloured by charging speed (lime ultra-rapid ≥150 kW, mint rapid 50–149 kW, teal standard or unmarked) and sized by how many charging points each hub has. The demand side of the grid: where the new electric load is going, the companion to the power-plants, wind and solar supply layers. An honest cut — the ~400,000 everyday slow chargers are left out, leaving the “can an EV road-trip here” backbone. Coverage follows OpenStreetMap and is ~90% Europe (a mapping skew, not reality — China, the biggest charging market on Earth, is barely mapped).LIVEBattery StorageThe world’s grid-scale batteries — 1,023 battery storage plants from OpenStreetMap, drawn as electric-violet cells sized by capacity: the missing piece of the grid story, where power is banked for when it’s needed. Storage is what makes a wind-and-solar grid work — charging when the sun blazes and the wind blows, discharging into the evening peak. The giants anchor the world view — van Gogh in Germany and Edwards & Sanborn in California (each about 1 GW) and Australia’s Waratah Super Battery — and the smaller plants reveal as you zoom in. The most globally balanced of the map’s OpenStreetMap layers, though China’s big and fast-growing storage fleet is still under-mapped.LIVEPumped StorageThe world’s pumped-storage hydro plants — 327 stations from OpenStreetMap, drawn as hydro-aqua two-reservoir marks sized by capacity in megawatts: the bulk, long-duration half of grid storage and the natural sibling of the battery layer. Pumped hydro is about 90% of the world’s installed grid-storage capacity — two reservoirs and a reversible turbine that pumps water uphill when power is cheap and lets it fall to generate when the grid runs short. The gigawatt giants anchor the world view — Fengning in China (3.6 GW, the biggest on Earth), Bath County and Ludington in the US, Japan’s deep mountain schemes — and the smaller stations reveal as you zoom in. Unusually for an OpenStreetMap layer the size ranking is broadly true to the real world: China runs the largest and fastest-growing fleet and tops the list outright.LIVEMajor DamsThe world’s major dams — 4,256 dams from Wikidata, drawn as steel-concrete dam-wall marks: the great walls of water that hold back rivers for hydropower, flood control, irrigation and water supply, and some of the largest structures humans have ever built. This is the civil-engineering twin of the hydroelectric stations bolted onto many of them (those live in the Power Plants layer). Because both OpenStreetMap and Wikidata catalogue ~80,000 dams (mostly tiny weirs) and the recorded height is both sparse and unit-contaminated (feet logged as metres), the set is ranked not by height but by NOTABILITY — how many Wikipedia language editions cover each dam — surfacing the genuine global roll-call: Three Gorges, Aswan, Hoover, Itaipu, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Nurek, Kariba, Akosombo, Tarbela. Because renown isn’t skewed by mapping completeness, this is the most globally-balanced layer on the canvas — East Asia leads on China’s dam-building boom, and Europe is only ~11%, the opposite of the OSM point layers.LIVEDesalinationThe world’s major desalination plants — 100 plants from Wikidata, drawn as water-droplet marks coloured by type: the great thirst-quenchers that turn seawater into fresh water, and they cluster exactly where water is scarcest, which makes this layer read almost as a negative of the Water Stress map. The biggest clusters fall on the Gulf states (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar), Australia, Spain’s Mediterranean coast, Israel, California and Chile’s Atacama mining coast. The colour carries the energy story: warm-orange COGENERATION plants (an “integrated water and power plant” — the gas-fired Gulf megaprojects that make electricity AND fresh water together off the turbines’ waste heat) vs cool-cyan STANDALONE plants (typically reverse-osmosis, drawing grid power to push seawater through membranes). Wikidata carries no capacity figure, so the drops are NOT sized — type is the colour. This is the named major-plant set, not a census: the Gulf’s true dominance is even greater than the count here, while well-documented countries like Chile and Spain show strongly.LIVEOil & Gas FieldsThe world’s notable oil and gas fields — 444 named fields from Wikidata, drawn as oil-derrick marks coloured by type: the extraction end of the energy chain, where the hydrocarbons come out of the ground before refineries turn crude into fuel and pipelines and LNG carry it away. The colour is what each field produces — amber for OIL, cyan for GAS (which cluster differently: the North Sea, Qatar’s North Field, the Russian Arctic) and lilac for fields that yield BOTH. The giants are all here: Ghawar, Rumaila, Burgan, Daqing, Cantarell, Prudhoe Bay, Ekofisk, Brent, Tengiz. One honesty note: Wikidata has bulk-imported thousands of tiny US fields, so the raw set is ~81% United States, which badly misrepresents world oil geography (the Gulf holds far bigger reserves in far fewer fields); the set is therefore cut to the NOTABLE fields (covered by at least two Wikipedia languages), which rebalances it to the real distribution across the North Sea, the Middle East, Russia and the Caspian, North America and beyond. Wikidata carries no reserves or production figure, so the derricks are NOT sized — type is the colour, and the world-famous fields show at world view while the rest reveal on zoom.LIVEThe Future GridPlanned and under-construction high-voltage transmission — 752 corridors at 300 kV and above that OpenStreetMap mappers have tagged as proposed or being built: the grid expansion racing to connect new renewables and feed the data-centre boom, drawn dashed and in green to set it apart from the lines that already exist.LIVEEnergy PipelinesThe major trunk pipelines that move energy across the world — 16,054 long-distance corridors from OpenStreetMap, coloured by what they carry: natural gas, crude oil or refined products. The other half of how energy moves, alongside the electricity grid — the long-distance transmission lines only, not the local mains, with coverage densest across the US and Europe.LIVEFuture FuelsThe molecule-networks of the energy transition — 222 trunk corridors from OpenStreetMap carrying hydrogen (the clean fuel) or carbon dioxide (captured carbon), coloured by molecule. The clean-energy companion to the Energy Pipelines layer, on the same trunk-only filter. An emerging picture: today it is overwhelmingly the US (the Gulf-Coast hydrogen cluster and the Permian/Gulf CO₂ network) plus NW-Europe’s first links. Honest by construction: most existing CO₂ lines were built to push oil out of ageing fields (enhanced oil recovery), not for climate storage.LIVEStrategic Petroleum ReserveThe world’s largest government emergency oil stockpile — the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, about 714 million barrels of capacity in roughly 60 salt caverns across four Gulf-Coast sites in Texas and Louisiana (US Dept. of Energy). Built after the 1973 oil embargo as a buffer against supply shocks, the reserve is drawn as salt-cavern marks sized by authorized capacity — Bryan Mound the largest, down to Bayou Choctaw — with the live national fill pulled from the EIA. It now sits near 46% of capacity, a 40-year low, drawing down fast under a 2026 emergency exchange.LIVECoal MinesWhere the world digs coal — 5,154 operating, mothballed and proposed coal mines from the Global Coal Mine Tracker (Global Energy Monitor), drawn as coal-chunk glyphs coloured by coal rank (brown lignite → lustrous anthracite) and sized by annual capacity. The picture is startlingly lopsided: China alone runs nearly half the world’s coal mines, with India, Indonesia, the US, Russia and Australia making up most of the rest — and unlike the oil-and-gas-field map, that is the REAL distribution, not a data skew. Proposed mines (the expansion pipeline) are drawn fainter.LIVESubmarine CablesThe undersea backbone of the internet — 714 submarine communications cables and their 1,914 landing points, from TeleGeography. The land grid moves energy across continents; these move the world’s data across oceans, and they are the literal plumbing that connects the world’s data centres. Drawn as glowing charge-blue lines over the sea, with the longest systems — 2Africa, Project Waterworth, SeaMeWe — spanning tens of thousands of kilometres.LIVEWater StressWhere water is scarce — the world’s watersheds recoloured by baseline water stress (the share of a basin’s renewable supply already withdrawn), from WRI Aqueduct 4.0. The other half of the data-centre story: AI campuses are cooled with water, so the overlay shows where the compute build-out is landing against where water is overdrawn — Northern Virginia’s Ashburn on abundant water, the Phoenix campuses in extreme stress. A baseline risk index (2023), at the sub-basin level; deep red marks the basins where withdrawals approach or exceed renewable supply.LIVELand CorridorsThe land the high-voltage grid takes — its rights-of-way. Every overhead line runs down a cleared corridor (an easement) that widens with voltage, because taller towers and bigger electrical clearances need more room. This shades the corridor of the same backbone the transmission layer draws, and adds it up: the world’s mapped high-voltage grid occupies roughly 74,000 km² of right-of-way, about the size of Panama. Corridor widths are typical figures by voltage class, drawn illustratively — the land cost of electrification, made visible.LIVEHVDCThe grid’s long-distance express lines — 995 high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) links from OpenStreetMap, up to ±1,100 kV. Where the transmission backbone is a meshed AC web, HVDC shoots bulk power point-to-point across deserts, mountains and seas — and is the only practical way to tie two separate grids together. Drawn as glowing magenta lines, brighter and heavier the higher the voltage: China dominates the ultra-high-voltage tier, while Europe’s are mostly the subsea interconnectors stitching national grids together under the North Sea and the Baltic.LIVECarbon IntensityHow clean is each country’s electricity — the world recoloured green to red by carbon intensity, the grams of CO₂ released per kilowatt-hour generated. Great Britain updates live and half-hourly from NESO; every other country shows its most recent annual average from Ember, and each figure is badged so live and annual are never confused. The cleanest grids — hydro, nuclear, geothermal — sit near zero; the dirtiest, still burning coal and oil, run well past 600. Zoom into Great Britain and the choropleth refines from country to grid region: its 14 DNO licence areas each recolour by their own live half-hourly figure — the first sub-national breakdown on the map, with the United States by balancing authority lined up to drop in next.