The United States makes the models. It ranks 24th at using them.
Microsoft's global AI diffusion survey puts the United Arab Emirates at 64%, Singapore at 61%, France at 44%, and the United States at 28.3% — behind twenty-three other economies. Select a country to see where it sits.
Classifying key
Source: Microsoft AI Economy Institute 2025, via Stanford University AI Index 2026 Report (Chapter 4 — Economy, Figure 4.3.12, p. 201). Definition: survey-based estimate of the share of the adult population using generative AI in the second half of 2025. Methodology per Misra et al. 2025. Countries outside the top 30 are rendered as no-data, not zero — the underlying dataset covers a wider set, but only the top 30 have publicly published percentages.
The insights
Here's what stood out from the data. Click a card to open it full size.
What a supply-side leader looks like from the demand side
In 2025 the United States committed more than twenty-three times as much private capital to AI as China did. American firms produce almost all of the leading frontier models. The industry's data centres, compute spend, and talent concentration all cluster on US soil. On every supply-side metric the AI Index tracks, the United States dominates.
It also ranks twenty-fourth in adoption. Behind Singapore, the UAE, every major European economy, Australia, Canada, South Korea, and — by a fraction — Taiwan. The reluctant user on a map of its own invention.
Where the Gulf got ahead
The UAE (64%) and Singapore (61%) sit well above what their GDP per capita would predict. Both have state-backed AI programmes, compact populations, high smartphone saturation, and governments that have written AI into every layer of public service. The rest of the top tier is European: France, Ireland, Norway, Spain, the Netherlands, the UK — all between 38% and 46%.
South Korea had the fastest change of any country over the year: from 25.9% in the first half to 30.7% in the second, climbing seven ranks in six months. The US moved 2.0 percentage points over the same window, a climb that left its rank unchanged.
The gap between making and using
The tiering here — leaders, strong, middle — is Microsoft's; we've mapped it onto Inkwell's paper palette so the ranks stay legible at a glance. Thirty countries carry a published percentage. The rest of the world is rendered as no-data, which is truer than a zero. The report's own map extrapolates a full world view; we've kept to the numbers.
Adoption trails invention by default: the microprocessor was invented in California decades before the median American household used one. But the gap between production and consumption of generative AI is unusually wide, and the shape of it — Gulf monarchies and Paris ahead of San Francisco — is the opposite of what the AI-race framing would suggest. — Ollie