What Georgia would score
if the politics held still.
Georgia is not a live Network School search. There is no announced MOU and no named ministry sponsor. It is on the watch list because it holds the strongest raw immigration primitive of any candidate: citizens of roughly 95 countries can enter visa-free and stay up to 365 days, and individual entrepreneurs pay 1% tax on turnover up to a high threshold.
Two developments cut against it. On 1 March 2026 new rules split visa-free entry from the right to work, so being in Georgia legally no longer automatically means working there legally, and remote work for a foreign employer sits in a gray zone. Politically, the ruling party suspended EU accession until 2028, the EU formally froze the process in December 2024, and 2024 to 2026 brought disputed elections, protest crackdowns, and repressive laws targeting civil society. The primitive is world-class; the trajectory is the risk.
Georgia tests a different failure mode than Malaysia. Forest City failed on facility licensing under a stable state. Georgia's risk is the opposite: friendly rules today, but a political trajectory that can rewrite them. The March 2026 work-rights split is exactly that pattern already happening. A node here needs its commitments codified, not customary.
Country, region, state, facility.
NS scouts in this order. Each level has its own gate, and the level that killed Forest City was the last one.
Georgia fails a gate.
No MOU, no named sponsor, no written commitment to Network School identified. The government is currently inward-turned, suspended from the EU track, and sanctioned by several Western states at official level. Every site below is capped at 49 until something is signed.
Al Jazeera, Georgia suspends EU accession talks →365-day visa-free entry for citizens of roughly 95 countries remains in force, which covers physical presence generously. The caveat is new: since 1 March 2026, visa-free entry no longer carries an automatic right to work, and remote work for a foreign employer is in a gray zone pending clarification.
Shareuhack, Georgia work permit 2026 changes →3 candidates, scored.
Each scored 0-5 on nine weighted axes, normalized to 100, then gate-capped. Expand any site for the axis-by-axis breakdown with sources.
Tbilisi
The capital and the country's center of gravity: cafe culture, a real startup and crypto scene, dramatic topography, and a cost of living that makes a campus radically cheap to run. The 1% individual-entrepreneur regime is the cleanest personal tax wrapper in the comparison. No site-specific legal regime, and the protests-and-crackdown cycle plays out here first.
Axis breakdown + sources
Kutaisi (Hualing FIZ)
Georgia's second city, home to an operating Free Industrial Zone offering 100% tax-free company operations, and to the country's low-cost-airline airport. The FIZ is a real, functioning wrapper, and Kutaisi land is even cheaper than Tbilisi. The trade is a thin amenity layer and a small talent pool.
Axis breakdown + sources
Batumi
Georgia's seaside city: beaches, a casino-and-towers skyline, subtropical climate, and a summer nomad scene. The best pure lifestyle proposition in the country, with the weakest institutional story. No confirmed site wrapper for the kind of campus NS runs.
Axis breakdown + sources
Georgia holds the best single immigration primitive in the comparison: 365 days of visa-free presence for most of the network's likely membership. If the only question were 'can members show up and stay', Georgia wins outright. But the March 2026 entry-versus-work split shows the rules can move, and the EU-accession freeze shows which direction the wind blows.
The resource-allocation read: Georgia is worth a quiet, exploratory conversation, not a campus commitment. If a future government wanted to codify a network-state regime the way it once codified the 1% entrepreneur status, Georgia would jump the queue overnight. Until then it is a watch-list entry with the strongest upside-per-signature in the set.
The level that actually bites.
Not researched to facility level, because the country gate fails. The one structural note worth recording now.
Kutaisi FIZ campus conversion
Operating tax-free zoneThe only Georgian option where a campus entity could sit inside a real, operating special regime from day one.
VERIFY: The FIZ is an industrial regime. Confirm in writing that residential-plus-education use is permitted inside the zone; that mismatch is the Forest City failure mode.
Kutaisi Free Zone →The rubric, live.
Rate a candidate 0-5 on each axis, or load a site and adjust. Untick a hard gate to watch the score get capped.
Weights come from the Malaysia post-mortem: government partnership (3.0x) and immigration (2.5x) outrank cost and lifestyle. The three gates above are not scores. Untick one and the result is capped regardless of everything else, because a licence granted is a licence that can be revoked. Decision support, not an oracle.
- Government partnership is a hard gate, not a score. A site with no written, named commitment is capped below the top tier no matter how cheap or pleasant it is.
- Immigration is a hard gate. Model visa status for the actual member-nationality mix, not the average case.
- Verify permitted use at the facility level, in writing, per unit. Malaysia was fine. Johor was fine. A premises-use licence on two adjoining units is what actually closed the campus.
- Keep 'earned recognition' and 'political goodwill' distinct. Goodwill from a ministry can reverse; codified law is stickier.
- Every non-obvious number is either sourced or explicitly labeled an editorial estimate. Do not launder estimates into facts when this reaches decision-makers.
The form is the rubric.
NS runs a public second-site search with a finder's fee at ns.com/search. What the form asks is what NS weighs. Distilled below, grouped by their own hierarchy.
Multiple submissions allowed; judged spam earns nothing.
- Socials plus at least two links, biggest business run or exited
- Could you operate or invest in this node yourself?
- Are you native to the country you are proposing?
- Every available digital-nomad visa: name, length in months, income floor, renewability
- Have you personally applied and gotten one? Exact dates, how long, screenshots
- The top three champions of tech in the country, with links
- Can you introduce us to any of them?
- Closest major city and closest international airport, by code
- Air quality index
- Exact address with a maps link, ownership type, your relationship to it
- Property type, year built, building m², lot m², unit count, bed count, average unit size
- Zoning: what the property can LEGALLY be used for
- Inside a special economic zone?
- Gym? Move-in ready? Rent, sale, or both? Room for expansion nearby?
- Facilities within a 30 minute drive: grocery, hospital, restaurants, transit, beach, sports, school
- At least 5 photos, a video walkthrough, wifi speed in Mbps
- 01Visas are interrogated hardest: program name, months, income floor, renewability, and proof you personally got one. That confirms immigration as a top-weight axis, and it demands receipts, not vibes.
- 02Three named tech champions with warm-intro paths: the government-partnership axis starts as a people problem. A signature begins with someone who can walk you into the room.
- 03Zoning is asked as 'what can this property LEGALLY be used for'. That is the exact question Forest City failed. The form learned the same lesson the rubric did.
- 04Beds, units, move-in readiness, expansion room: speed to 1,024 residents is a first-class criterion. A gorgeous site that needs two years of construction loses to a move-in-ready one.
- 05Air quality index is a named field. Our rubric folded it into livability; NS asks for the number itself.
- 06The bounty shape ($100 to $100,000) says NS expects thousands of submissions and needs exactly one to be right. Precision beats volume; a judged-spam submission earns zero.
- ▢Zoning: the permitted use covers residence plus coworking plus education, per unit, in writing
- ▢Special economic zone status of the parcel itself, not the district around it
- ▢Move-in readiness: occupancy possible without construction, or a dated, penalized delivery schedule
- ▢Capacity: units and beds against the 1,024-resident target, with the expansion parcel identified
- ▢The burn: gym on site, and outdoor training viable in the local climate most of the year
- ▢Thirty-minute circle: grocery, hospital, restaurants, transit, and ideally a beach or mountains
- ▢Wifi speed measured on site in Mbps, plus the airport code and drive time
- ▢Air quality index for the site, not the country average
- Shareuhack, Georgia work permit 2026: the entry-versus-work split
- Al Jazeera, Georgia suspends EU accession talks until 2028
- International Crisis Group, Managing Georgia's turn against the EU
- Kutaisi Free Industrial Zone, official
- Healy Consultants, guide to Georgia's three Free Industrial Zones
Axis scores are editorial estimates by Interneta from public sources, not an official Network School ranking. Every non-obvious claim carries a source; values without one are labeled editorial estimates in the breakdown.