Athena
Economics of AI and computation
Four engines covering the full AI economics stack: silicon (chip families, foundries, trade controls), compute models (frontier labs, training runs, inference costs), markets (hyperscaler capex, cloud regions, venture), and policy/macro (regulation, talent flows, national strategies). Multi-entity warehouse, AI-augmented briefs, ~195 economies. Default port 8007.
What this observatory tracks
Silicon engine
Chip families, foundry capacity, semiconductor trade flows, export controls. Tracks the physical substrate that makes AI compute possible, from wafer starts to packaging and equipment.
Compute models engine
Frontier model releases, training compute estimates, inference cost curves, benchmark progressions. Structured data on labs, architectures, and the economics of scaling.
Markets engine
Hyperscaler capital expenditure, cloud region buildouts, AI venture funding rounds, public-market valuations. Revenue concentration, pricing dynamics, capacity utilization.
Policy and macro engine
National AI strategies, regulatory frameworks, talent migration data, R&D expenditure as share of GDP, compute sovereignty indices. The institutional and fiscal layer around AI adoption.
4 engines, 53 collectors
Each engine groups collectors by economic domain. Collectors pull from public APIs, structured datasets, and institutional sources on staggered UTC schedules. All data lands in a single SQLite warehouse with consistent schema.
Production surface
FastAPI and Starlette middleware: gzip, optional CORS for explicit origins, security headers, X-Request-ID on every response, optional JSON log lines via LOG_JSON. Readiness runs SELECT 1 against SQLite. Optional GET /metrics exposes athena_http_* counters and latency histograms. Jinja2 templates for AI-augmented briefs.
- Warehouse: WAL SQLite, tuned page cache and mmap, optimize on shutdown.
- Ingestion: httpx async client, APScheduler for staggered UTC collection windows.
- Briefs: Jinja2 templates rendering structured data into economist-readable summaries.
- OpenAPI: /docs and /redoc on the running service.
Route map (read-only data)
All under /api/data/. Query parameters support filtering, year windows, pagination, and multi-series panels. Admin routes under /api/admin/ require X-Admin-Key when configured.
What operators should know
Fifty-three collectors across four engines means collection runs are substantial. The client spaces requests to stay within public API rate limits. For production, set a real admin secret, decide whether metrics scrape is internal-only, and back up the SQLite file with a quiet window or the SQLite backup API.
The exhaustive manual (schema DDL, every query parameter, troubleshooting, deployment notes) lives in the repo:
Start the observatory
From the athena/ directory:
Integration tests against live APIs:
Then open http://127.0.0.1:8007/docs or call /api/data/sources.