The National AI Compute Index.
Compute has become an industrial input on the order of energy and capital. NACI measures which nations can supply it, afford it, power it, and govern it — in one comparable signal.
Who is positioned to compute?
Every serious national AI strategy eventually runs into the same three constraints: the compute you can acquire, the energy you can dedicate to it, and the capital and institutions required to keep both flowing. Headlines track chip deals. Almost nothing tracks the system.
NACI treats national compute readiness as a system: acquisition capacity, energy availability and cost, capital depth, infrastructure, and the governance arrangements that determine whether capacity translates into capability. The index compresses that system into a signal that can be compared across countries and tracked as the landscape shifts.
For policymakers, NACI is a positioning instrument. For multilaterals and development institutions, it is an allocation instrument — a way to see which economies are structurally shut out of the compute economy, and what would change that.
Four dimensions of compute readiness.
Compute acquisition
The nation's realistic ability to acquire and operate frontier and near-frontier compute, from hardware access to data-center capability.
Power to run it
Whether the grid can dedicate the energy compute demands — availability, cost, reliability, and headroom for growth.
Financing the buildout
The depth of capital — public and private — available to finance compute infrastructure at the scale the ambition requires.
Turning capacity into capability
The institutional arrangements that determine whether raw capacity becomes national capability: policy, talent, and coordination.
Two instruments, one picture.
NACI and the Optional Work Index are designed to be read together. NACI measures a nation's capacity to perform machine work; OWI measures how far that capacity has actually shifted the balance of work. The gap between the two is where policy lives — and it is the core analytical frame of The Optional Work Report.