Machinepower
A sovereignty test measuring the capacity and capability of nations to build, control, and deploy artificial intelligence at strategic scale.
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.
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).
Nations are not adopting AI because it is innovative. They are adopting it because they must.
Three axes of power.
Watts
The tangible foundations: energy, infrastructure, and compute. Without the physical capacity to run models, sovereignty is impossible.
- Planning & Permitting
- Firm Power Strategy
- Sovereign Compute
- Hardware & Silicon
Weights
Control over intelligence itself: who builds models, shapes behaviour, and retains talent.
- Frontier Capability
- Alignment
- Governance
- Talent Density
Will
The capacity to wire AI into the state while maintaining legitimacy and public consent.
- Procurement Reform
- Institutional Capability
- Workforce Transition
- Societal Legitimacy
Bottlenecks, not averages.
AI capability behaves like a production system: the slowest stage limits total output. The Index applies a bottleneck penalty — 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."
Choices, not rankings.
Not every nation needs — or can afford — full AI sovereignty. Each tier describes the specific trade-offs a nation has accepted.
Total Sovereignty
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.
Strategic Autonomy
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.
Diffusion Advantage
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.
Who holds machinepower.
Preview — illustrative data ahead of the Fall 2026 release. Points below the dashed line carry a bottleneck penalty: the weakest axis, not the average, sets the score. Hover any point for detail.
Every jurisdiction, on the record.
United States
Japan
United Kingdom
US–South Korea Semiconductor & AI Initiative
A key-tier industrial partnership securing critical High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) supply corridors in exchange for model weight access.
UK–Japan Frontier Technology Partnership
Combines the UK's world-class software and research density with Japan's advanced hardware manufacturing and optical supply chains.
"This partnership leverages complementary industrial bases to enhance mutual economic security and national technological agency… to ensure both nations remain AI makers and not just AI takers." — Sovereignty Alliance Dossier, June 2026
Coming Fall 2026.
The Machinepower Index will assess which nations possess sovereign AI capacity and which face structural dependencies that constrain strategic choice. Be the human in the loop — sign up to receive the priority briefing.
Our North Star: to become the GDP of AI sovereignty — the standard measure of national power in the Intelligence Age.
Clarity for decision-makers in the intelligence age.
Machinepower Briefings translate the Index into actionable insight for governments and executive teams.
Get in touch →Questions, answered plainly.
What is "Machinepower"? +
Machinepower 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.
What is the origin of the Index? +
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.
How is the Index calculated? +
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.
What are the Three Axes? +
Material (Watts): Energy, land, silicon, and firm dispatchable capacity. If you cannot build and power compute, everything else is theatre.
Intellectual (Weights): Control over the technology itself — data access, IP rights, and regulatory standards.
Political (Will): The ability to wire AI into the state while maintaining legitimacy and public consent.
What is the "North Star" of the Index? +
Our long-term vision is for the MPI to serve as a modern equivalent to GDP. When GDP was introduced in the 1930s, it provided a much-needed, unified metric for measuring a nation's industrial output. Traditional economic metrics today are failing to capture the new reality of the AI transition.
Our North Star is for the MPI to become the standard global framework used by policymakers and institutions to measure a nation's technological sovereignty, compute capacity, and future resilience.
Is this a technical survey? +
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.