Coatlicue: Mexico’s Supercomputer May Be Mexico's Great Leap Forward Event

Who Survives Tomorrow?

* This article is an opinion based on my “educated” thoughts after years of working in military and global logistics before moving into the Tech/Cloud/AI world. I could be wrong, I could be right. But these are my controversial thoughts.

Mexico is unveiling Coatlicue, a national AI supercomputer with the compute power of roughly 375,000 machines running in parallel.

On paper, it is the most ambitious technological upgrade the country has attempted in decades, a move normally associated with nations like Singapore or the UAE…places where infrastructure and political stability justify these investments. Instead, Mexico is rolling it out during one of the most unstable periods it has experienced in years.

Farmers are unable to make a living from their crops.
Truckers are hijacked or extorted on highways that were supposedly federal and secure.
Doctors feel abandoned by the system, their wages stagnant while public hospitals fall apart.
Teachers march for basic resources.
Cartels expand geographically while the state shrinks territorially.

The peso only stays strong, artificially, at the expense of exporters and local producers.
Nearshoring hypotetically could deepen inequality faster than it creates sustainable development.

Most assume this is either a tone deaf technocratic fantasy or another example of the government funneling funds into opaque projects that help friends, donors, or political allies.

Some interpret it as an attempt to signal “modernity” to foreign investors without addressing the structural rot that prevents real modernization.

But there is my dark interpretation that the political class will never say publicly, but becomes possible when you look at global patterns.

Governments don’t always invest in the population they have.
They invest in the population they want to exist in 20 to 30 years.

China did this during the Great Leap Forward. Tens of millions died while the state restructured the economy according to its long term strategic vision. The regime didn’t creat policy for its poor and peasants; it designed them to becomie and industrialized superpower.

El Salvador did its own version under Bukele, removing a significant portion of the country’s violent population in less than two years so the remainder could accelerate economically. Singapore, South Korea, and the Gulf States built their modern societies not by uplifting every region or demographic but by prioritizing the regions and populations most aligned with their future economies. Everyone else gets left behind.

Mexico could be entering its own version of this logic.
Coatlicue is for the Mexico that the state hopes will exist after the current one has been reshaped, fragmented, or partially discarded.

Coatlicue could provide the computational backbone for a very different kind of Mexico, built around automation, surveillance, industrial optimization, energy analytics, climate forecasting, robotics, and a digitally oriented workforce.

So the uncomfortable truth follows.