A sovereignty test measuring the capacity and capability of nations to build, control, and deploy artificial intelligence at strategic scale.
The ability to deploy AI at scale is the defining strategic capability of the twenty-first century.
The decisive resources of the twenty-first century will not be land, labour, or votes, but compute, models, and the energy to sustain them. Whoever controls this infrastructure will control everything built atop it: markets, militaries, governance, and the information environment itself.
This is machinepower: the ability to generate and deploy artificial intelligence at scale. Nations are not adopting AI because it is innovative. They are adopting it because they must.
The difference between an AI maker and an AI taker will determine national fate in the century ahead.
A measure of capacity and capability, not promise.
The Machinepower Index (MPI) 2026 is a policy tool that assesses national capacity across three strategic axes — Watts (Material), Weights (Intellectual), and Will (Political).
The Machinepower Index qualifies nations across the three strategic axes of power.
The tangible foundations: energy, infrastructure, and compute. Without the physical capacity to run models, sovereignty is impossible.
Control over intelligence itself: who builds models, shapes behaviour, and retains talent.
The capacity to wire AI into the state while maintaining legitimacy and public consent.
The Index applies a "bottleneck penalty" where a weak axis pulls the composite score down disproportionately, reflecting real-world constraints on deployment.
"You can't regulate your way out of a blackout."— Machinepower Index 2026
Strategic Tiers
Not every nation needs — or can afford — full AI sovereignty. These are choices, not rankings. Each tier explains the specific trade-offs a nation has accepted.
End-to-end capacity to build, train, and sustain artificial intelligence without reliance on any external state. This is the strategic North Star — a best-case scenario that no state can truly achieve in full, but which defines the theoretical limit of national capability. It requires vast capital and decades of industrial planning to vertically integrate energy, silicon, and model weights.
The choice to own the mind while importing the hardware. By accepting dependence on external chips and hyperscalers, a nation focuses its resources on owning the intelligence: national datasets, fine-tuned models, and regulatory standards. It is an agile path to independent agency, though it remains vulnerable to hardware & energy choke points and international sanctions.
Prioritising rapid adoption and economic utility above technological ownership. This posture focuses on leveraging best-in-class external tech to transform society at maximum speed. By procuring the most advanced models from global vendors, a nation achieves maximum efficiency, but accepts a structural reliance where strategic choices are ultimately constrained by external infrastructure and world events.
Coming Q2 2026
The Machinepower Index will assess which nations possess sovereign AI capacity and which face structural dependencies that constrain strategic choice.
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Machinepower Briefings translate the Index into actionable insight for governments and executive teams.
Book a briefingMachinepower is the strategic capability and capacity to generate and deploy artificial intelligence at scale. It represents a paradigm shift from manpower — the historical foundation of national strength — to sovereign computational and algorithmic capacity.
This Index grew out of the research for the book, Machinepower: The Realpolitik of Artificial Intelligence, which examines how the ability to deploy AI at scale is becoming the defining strategic capability of the twenty-first century.
I am conducting extensive interviews with figures shaping the Intelligence Age — from government insiders and think tank heads to executives at major hyperscalers — to inform the Index's structure.
The Index identifies bottlenecks. AI capability behaves like a production system: the slowest stage limits total output. Unlike traditional indices that average scores, the MPI identifies where structural weaknesses (like energy or regulation) create a ceiling on total power.
The Index measures the alignment of three forms of power:
No. This is a sovereignty test. It is not about speculation or ethics, but about realpolitik: the fact that AI is already being nationalised. It provides a measure of capacity and capability, identifying who is actively constructing the emerging AI-powered order.