How Many Days of AI Does New Zealand Have?

New Zealand knows how many days of diesel it has. At 11:59pm on Sunday 23 August, the answer was 44.8 days in the country or on ships headed here. Petrol was 49.2 days. Jet fuel was 42. A separate Crown-controlled diesel reserve at Marsden Point sat outside those numbers. MBIE publishes the count every Wednesday. We do not know how many days of AI New Zealand has. Days may be the wrong unit. You can put diesel in a tank. You cannot put next month's inference in a tank. A token is made at the moment somebody asks for it, using a model, a rack of accelerators, electricity, cooling, storage, networks and people. That makes the more useful question harder. If foreign AI suppliers stopped taking our orders, how much useful inference could New Zealand produce for itself? At the moment, not enough of the answer is under our control. A modest version of this argument says we should keep some open-weight models, make systems portable and sign backup contracts. We should do all of that. It is…