DePIN’s defining promise is that infrastructure follows the incentive, not the corporate capex plan. A farmer in rural Kenya can earn from a weather station. An apartment dweller in Bangkok can run a Helium hotspot. This geographic democratisation of infrastructure deployment is unprecedented — and the data is starting to prove it out.

io.net aggregates GPU compute from 138+ countries, with 82,752 verified GPU nodes and over 80k CPUs. Helium has deployed 912,000+ active hotspots across every continent. Grass connects 2.4 million devices across 190+ countries routing bandwidth for AI training data. These are not paper metrics — each node is a real device consuming real electricity to provide a real service.

Value density is highest in dense urban centres. San Francisco leads with 58,200 hotspot equivalents tracked in our dataset, followed by New York (42,100), Tokyo (28,400), and Berlin (22,400). This creates a geographic arbitrage: under-served regions often offer better rewards-per-node ratios since local competition is lower, though actual data traffic to validate contributions may also be thinner.

Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa are dePIN’s next growth frontier. Electricity costs are lower, legacy telco infrastructure is thinner, and the income differential makes token rewards more attractive relative to local alternatives. Networks like Helium Mobile and XNET are targeting precisely this gap — carrier-grade mobile coverage in underserved markets.

Peaq — the L1 built for the machine economy — hosts over 6 million machine and human addresses, arguably making it the densest dePIN identity layer globally. Every connected vehicle, industrial sensor, and compute node registered on Peaq represents one more physical touchpoint in the decentralised machine network.