IPCIDE Visiting Scholar Seminar Series
The Geography of AI firms

August 5, 2026, 15:00 – 16:00 PM, ICRIER Conference Room, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi / Hybrid

Speaker: Vatsala Shreeti, Economist, Monetary and Economic Department, Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Basel, Switzerland

Brief Description: In this paper, we trace the geography and economic characteristics of firms that produce artificial intelligence (AI) products and services. Many economies around the world are evaluating their strategic priorities in AI, yet relatively little is documented about the global distribution of AI production. We construct a new database that identifies 1,246 AI-producing firms across 32 economies. We map these firms in each economy into the five layers of the AI supply chain: compute, cloud and related infrastructure, data tools, AI models and AI applications. The biggest markets for AI production are China and the US. Most economies specialise only in a few supply chain layers and many focus largely on compute. AI firms in all economies exhibit strong home bias in investment activity, with a focus on downstream applications. Finally, we find that venture capital inflows are strongly correlated with the presence and density of AI firms in a given economy.

About the Speaker: Vatsala is an Economist working with the Innovation and Digital Economy team in the research department of the Bank for International Settlements. Her research interests include empirical industrial organisation and digital economics. Her recent work has focused on the production of artificial intelligence, AI supply chains, incentives for patenting, adoption of technology in emerging markets and pricing in fast payment systems. She is also a research affiliate at CESifo.

Vatsala holds a PhD in Economics from the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), a Masters of Science in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a Bachelor of Arts (with Honors) in Economics from Miranda House, University of Delhi.