A new metric called GDI (Gross Domestic Intelligence) is emerging as a way to gauge national competitiveness in the AI era, instead of traditional GDP, Business Insider reported on Thursday.

GDI is a concept that measures countries’ AI resource holdings by focusing on access to AI compute infrastructure such as GPUs, network equipment and data centres.

Morgan Stanley analysts said in a recent investor memo that investors may start assessing GDI resources at the national level, and that it could become an important investment yardstick for judging competitiveness across countries and industries.

AI research group Epoch AI estimated last year each region’s share of global AI compute. The United States was highest at about 75 percent, followed by China at about 10 percent. The European Union, Norway and Japan came next.

Epoch AI released similar estimates this week. They compare AI compute capabilities by company and country as of the fourth quarter of 2025. The benchmark is compute capacity that includes AI chips comparable to Nvidia's H100 GPU. Compute capability refers to the amount of computation each AI chip can process at peak performance.

By company, Google showed an overwhelming lead based on its in-house TPUs and large-scale Nvidia GPUs. All of the top companies were U.S. firms. China's AI compute scale was estimated at a level similar to Oracle's.