Thermodynamic ranking of companies in Kardashev terms

Civilization climbs on the energy it can harness.

Joules, not vibes.

The Kardashev Index ranks the companies pushing humanity up the gradient. Most of every score is measured: reported energy, compute and growth, converted to watts in code from documents we fetch and verify ourselves. The rest is clearly labelled opinion, argued only from verified quotes.

See the leaderboard How it’s measured

03Entities ranked

65%Measured weight

30Verified sources

The Leaderboard

Who is moving us up the curve.

Kardashev Index, 0–10: 65% measured from reported energy, compute and growth; 35% labelled opinion. Higher means more fuel on the fire.

Companies ranked by Kardashev Index score, 0 to 10: 65% measured from reported figures, 35% opinion
Rank	Entity	K-equiv	Energy	Compute	Growth	Opinion	Index
01	X.AI LLC Aerospace & AI	—	no figure	7.9	—	7.3	Climbing 7.6/10 conf 26% · meas 43%
02	NVIDIA Corporation Semiconductors	0.208	2.7	—	8.9	6.0	Holding 5.1/10 conf 45% · meas 75%
03	Crusoe AI data center infrastructure	0.128	0.7	5.8	—	5.1	Decelerating 3.6/10 conf 46% · meas 65%

Not ranked yetApproved; waiting on a measured run or more verified data

Anduril Industriesinsufficient data: 27% of weight scored (needs 60%)
Anthropic PBCinsufficient data: energy undisclosed and 57% of the remaining weight scored (needs 60%, including compute or growth)
Extropic Corp.insufficient data: energy undisclosed and 50% of the remaining weight scored (needs 60%, including compute or growth)
Tesla, Inc.energy source found but couldn't be read (4: HTTP 403); retry scheduled

Bands — Accelerating 8+ · Climbing 6+ · Holding 4+ · Decelerating <4 Measured figures are computed in code from sources we fetched; opinion is model-judged against written rubrics. Entities are admin-approved; scores are never hand-edited.

Why joules

Progress has a unit.

Every civilization that ever mattered was a machine for turning energy into possibility. We think the builders doing that work should be measured — and seen.

Energy is the substrate.

Every model trained, every factory run, every launch is energy put to work. A civilization’s reach is its power budget, and the companies that grow it widen what everyone can do.
Measure, don’t emote.

Figures come from documents we fetch ourselves, with the verbatim quote that states them. Dead links and quotes we can’t find are thrown out. Disagree with the evidence, not the mood. Vibes are not data.
The gradient points up.

Energy harnessed, compute built, growth compounding — then the frontier pushed, the speed of building, the permission to build. Forces that move us toward a planet’s worth of power, then a star’s. The light is worth climbing toward.

The Kardashev Ladder

Each rung is ten billion times the last.

Proposed by Nikolai Kardashev in 1964; interpolated by Carl Sagan as K = (log₁₀P − 6) / 10, with P in watts.

Today

Humanity, all sources combined. Roughly Type 0.73.

≈ 2 × 10¹³ W

Type I

Planetary. All the power available on a world.

10¹⁶ W

Type II

Stellar. The full output of a star, harvested by a Dyson swarm.

10²⁶ W

Type III

Galactic. The light of a hundred billion suns.

10³⁶ W

Curve is schematic — at true scale, everything before Type III would be a flat line. “Today” uses ~620 EJ/yr of global primary energy.

Add to the board

Know a builder the index is missing?

Suggestions are reviewed by admins before anything is measured or published.

Civilization climbs on the energy it can harness.

Who is moving us up the curve.

Progress has a unit.

Energy is the substrate.

Measure, don’t emote.

The gradient points up.

Each rung is ten billion times the last.

Know a builder the index is missing?