Six thousand zones.
One customer.
The world has built somewhere between 5,400 and 6,200+ special economic zones across ~180 countries, and most sit under-filled. Every one was built for a customer that barely existed: a portable population of high-earning builders who can land anywhere, incorporate anywhere, and leave anywhere.
That customer exists now. A network school is the ideal customer profile of the entire SEZ industry: a thousand vetted, high-income, law-abiding residents who arrive as a bloc, spend as a bloc, and leave a campus behind. The zones are the supply side. NS is the demand side. This page is the matchmaking.
Zone counts: UNCTAD (~5,400) · SEZ Explorer (6,200+) · mapped beautifully by the Open Zone Map (Adrianople Group).
What NS actually optimizes for, ranked.
Distilled from the live ns.com/search intake, the Forest City post-mortem, and the Kazakhstan MOU terms. P0 outranks everything below it.
Zoning permitted-use in writing, per unit, plus the parcel's SEZ status. The only thing that has ever actually killed a node. The intake asks it verbatim: what can this property LEGALLY be used for.
A named minister and a signed document. The intake's three-tech-champions-with-intros question is the signature pipeline: commitments begin as warm introductions.
Every program enumerated with length, income floor, renewability, and proof a real person obtained one, with dates and screenshots. Brochure claims score zero.
Move-in ready beats beautiful. Units, beds, average unit size, expansion room nearby. Hotel-grade stock now outranks renders later.
Gym on site for the burn, the thirty-minute circle (grocery, hospital, restaurants, transit, beach), measured wifi, and AQI, which the intake names as its own field.
Closest major city and international airport by code. A node the network cannot reach cheaply bleeds members.
One owner beats many, disclosed relationships beat mystery brokers, and rent-or-sale optionality beats either alone.
Cheapness never substitutes for a gate. It breaks ties between sites that already pass.
25 candidate sites, tiered.
S executes (2), A pursues the signature (7), B tracks (10), C watches (6). Quick-scan scores are raw against the 9-axis rubric before gate caps; entries with a full breakdown link to their country search.
The only site on earth pairing a signed sovereign MOU with a codified common-law wrapper. The legal seat regardless of where beds land. Alem.ai, the same city's government-run AI centre, is the specific building answer.
Blank canvas AND legally wrapped, beside the deepest talent pool in the country. The campus if delivery dates arrive in writing.
Forty minutes by ferry from Singapore, blessed by BOTH governments, with an Apple Developer Academy on site. Two economic ministries co-launched it: that is half a signature already. Indonesia's E33G visa income floor ($60k/yr) is steep for early-career builders.
Highest raw score of any unsigned site. One aimed conversation with the authority answers whether a written campus commitment exists.
A real, operating, government-inaugurated building inside the most generous long-stay regime researched this pass, no income minimum, a decade of stay. The one open question is whether it can actually house residents or only work them.
A reclaimed-land jurisdiction whose commission approves visas in five days. Post-crisis Sri Lanka is hungry, and the zone's law says so.
A state that pays your early rent to come build is a state pre-disposed to sign. The pitch writes itself; the burn and neutrality axes need honest scoring.
The cheapest signature test in the set: the state already staffs crypto diplomacy. Ask once; the file opens or closes at zero cost.
The rare zone whose statute already covers immigration. Dollarized, hub airport, and housing that exists rather than renders.
An American-built runway-and-grid with agencies openly hunting locators. Weaker on wrapper novelty and visa speed than the A tier.
Was the immigration crown jewel; the entry-versus-work split shows the rules can move against you.
Industrial zoning must be re-permitted for residence and education. That is the Forest City question, verbatim.
The only candidate inside the EU single market. The regime's end-2026 authorization horizon is the thing to verify before leaning in.
A government experimenting toward exactly this guest profile, on an island built to host. No wrapper for the entity is the gap.
The lifestyle blocker just fell: foreigners drink on a passport, employees by permit. Still a domestic-facing zone with hard inbound visas.
The strongest execution culture on the continent. The visa openness is Africa-facing, which fits a pan-African cohort more than a global one.
The proven EU nomad island. Not deep-researched this pass; scores are editorial pending a full country file.
Beats every other candidate on deal clarity: exact address, named broker, single owner, real beds today. Its one disqualifying-shaped weakness is the visa question, which has no good honest answer as designed for a US territory.
The Premium Visa is real, fast, and generous, exactly the P2 story this search kept failing to find. The gap is P3: nothing residential sits inside the one proven tech district.
An $11B ICSID claim (bifurcation ordered March 2026) is what zone-law-versus-sovereign looks like when it fails. If the new government settles and re-charters, this re-rates overnight. Until then it is the rubric's Exhibit A. Duna Tower proves beds can get built even under legal siege.
Maximal announced ambition, minimal delivered substance. Announcements are not zoning.
Everything about it is enormous, including the uncertainty. Editorial entry; watch only.
If Indonesia is the play, Nongsa is the near-term move and Nusantara the decade bet. Editorial entry.
Historically significant and heavily documented in press, but nothing permanent came of it and the property was never dedicated to this use. Included as the honest answer to "what happened to the Zuzalu site," not as a live candidate.
Act 60 built a genuine expat cluster, but nothing here clears the bar of a named, addressable, campus-scale building. Cayman's competing nomad visa expired in 2024 and is confirmed not reopening.
The ns.com/search intake pays $100 to $100,000 for winning site proposals. The pipeline: validate an S or A tier site here, then fill their intake to spec: every visa with receipts, three named champions with intro paths, zoning verified in writing, beds counted, AQI measured, photos taken. Precision beats volume.