alt Hacker NewsAdding for somewhat completeness sake those are 13 anycast IP addresses with upwards of 2000 servers responding to them. The US has about 500 to 700 of those servers. The EU about 600 servers and the rest of the world 600 to 900 but I do not have exact numbers. One of the root DNS server admins would have to chime in for more accurate numbers. I am fairly certain that the EU servers belong to companies in the EU not that it entirely relates to the overall management hierarchy but I don't know their management structure.
Africa and the middle east have the least, something like ~100 or so.
Some DNS servers can cache their zone information [1].
The anycast is for the /24 those IP addresses share (first.three.octects.0/24) But if you look those /24 are Arin.
Dig +trace shows the recursive lookup (forwarders) used for your NS.
They almost always end up Arin and arpa. I've troubleshot some connection issues between different data centers and transit providers and found root hint oddities I just escalate to my supervisor