The Pirate Bay has just released a Google-powered map of the tracker connections per country. The map is only the start of a much larger project that will cover more detailed statistics on the tracker's users. However, it already reveals some interesting data.

In the past few weeks The Pirate Bay has been struggling with an increase in visitors, and a corresponding load on their servers. Luckily, with a recent upgrade of the site’s tracker servers, there is some room to breathe again.

“We just upgraded the trackers from 12 old boxes to 8 new ones that handle the same load, but now only at 20% CPU usage, so we can grow a bit more,” Pirate Bay co-founder TiAMO told TorrentFreak. “Having some spare power in the servers has allowed us to collect some fun stats,” he added, pointing us to a map showing where all the connections to the Pirate Bay tracker come from.

Interestingly, according to the geo-IP data, the map reveals that 33% of all connections come from China – around 7 million peers. This is an impressive statistic by itself, but even more interesting when you consider that the Pirate Bay website is actually blocked in China. The tracker seems to be popular elsewhere in Asia also, with 5.9% of connections coming from Taiwan and 4.2% from Japan at the time of writing.

We further see that the United States comes in second with 8%, and Sweden – the home of the Pirate Bay – is responsible for little over 1% (250,000 peers) of the tracker connections. Since Sweden has a population of approximately 9 million people, this is actually quite an accomplishment. These statistics are of course just a snapshot. They are updated frequently and vary depending on the time of the day.

This relatively simple map is just the beginning, TiAMO told us. In the near future more statistics will be added, such as the type of BitTorrent clients people use, and the average download and upload speeds per region. Some raw data will also be made available to the public, but not without guaranteeing the anonymity of the tracker’s users of course.