Morgan Stanley introduces GDI as new AI economic metric

Analysts at Morgan Stanley have introduced a pioneering economic concept termed Gross Domestic Intelligence (GDI) to measure national strength in the burgeoning artificial intelligence era.

This metric shifts the focus beyond traditional Gross Domestic Product, instead evaluating a nation’s performance through its access to critical AI resources, including high-performance chips, data centres, and raw computing power.

As the global tech and finance sectors evolve, investors are increasingly looking for sophisticated methods to assess competitiveness in a world where AI compute capacity has become a primary driver of economic potential.

The GDI framework specifically measures infrastructure such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and advanced networking systems.

According to Morgan Stanley, this data will serve as an essential "investment overlay" when evaluating various economies and industries.

Research published by Epoch AI supports the significance of this shift, revealing that the United States currently maintains a commanding 75% share of global AI computing power.

In contrast, China controls approximately 10%, while Europe, Japan, and Norway hold the remaining portions.

Based on figures released in December 2025, the research identifies Google as the market leader due to its strategic integration of proprietary Tensor Processing Units with Nvidia hardware.

The data also estimates that China's total computing capacity currently matches only a single large-scale system, such as Oracle’s, highlighting a substantial computational gap.

This development follows years of intensive hardware competition and suggests that future economic dominance will depend heavily on digital infrastructure.

Morgan Stanley plans to refine the GDI model as more data on emerging chip architectures becomes available.