Methodology

Sources are grouped by the question they answer, not by their number, because a count ages on its own. What firms do: INEGI's 2024 Economic Census in its definitive series, and Centro México Digital for the size breakdown on those same microdata. What the Plan says: the ATDT document of April 2026. What it is compared against: the Eurostat and OECD series, which measure the same class of firm. What moving is worth: the Ministry of Economy's communiqué of 5 June 2026, which circulates a study by the same centre on manufacturing. What instrument exists: the Plan México incentive decree in the Official Gazette of 21 January 2025, and the annual reports of the Ministry of Economy, which runs it. And what computing exists: the TOP500 lists and Secihti's communiqués on Coatlicue. The full list, with each one's trap, is on the sources page.

The census publishes three universes and confusing them changes the result by a factor of four. The census universe is 5,468,180 economic units. Of those, 1,444,950 used the internet. Of the latter, 1,266,352 used some digital tool, and it is on that base that INEGI calculates the 2.1 percent for artificial intelligence. The fourth base is not a universe but a cut: among firms with ten or more people, Centro México Digital computes 8.0 percent from the same census's microdata. It is the figure that circulates in the press, and the one this report uses to compare with the OECD, which measures with that same cut. It is marked as reported, not official: the microdata are not freely downloadable and the calculation cannot be reproduced from outside. A note on vocabulary: an economic unit is an establishment, not a company, and the report writes firm where the sentence calls for it, its own headline included; what is counted is always establishments. And that comparison has a limit: the size cut matches, the instrument does not. Eurostat asks about several artificial intelligence techniques and counts anyone using any of them; the Mexican census asks a single yes or no inside a list of nine tools. How much that moves the figure is unknown, and the report does not estimate it. The report always uses INEGI's base and declares the conversion when taking it to the full universe.

Seven things, and the most important goes first. The band of where Mexico would be today, between 8.0 and 19.8 percent, which comes from applying to the Mexican figure the growth Eurostat did measure in Europe: it is arithmetic on someone else's series, not a Mexican measurement, and the report publishes no point inside that band. The size ratios against Europe, 0.94 for small firms and 0.56 for large ones, which are the division of two measured figures. The count of units using artificial intelligence, which comes from applying the percentage to the base and is published with a rounding band, between 25,960 and 27,227. Coatlicue's multiples against the TOP500. And its two delivery dates, 2027 and 2028, which come from adding the declared 24 month horizon to each of the two starts the official documents declare: planning in one and construction in the other. And the two ratios, which also come with a band because they derive from rounded figures: the share of the whole census, one in every 206, falling between 201 and 211; and the distance between the first and last state, 5.4 times, falling between 5.1 and 5.8. All seven are labelled as own calculation and none is presented as official.

Over the document's body, 6,746 words, trimming the cover, table of contents and bibliography: counting over the whole PDF repeats section titles and adds the words of the nineteen bibliographic entries. The comparison is done without accents and in lower case. Each term keeps its literal context and those contexts are published in the data dashboard, up to ten per term: above ten the occurrence is counted but not transcribed, and the chart declares it. Ten covers in full any term the report makes a claim about.

The Plan's canonical URL on ATDT's portal returns 403 to any automated client, on both domains. The file that was measured was downloaded from a public mirror, and that is why the repository stores its SHA-256: a word count over a document that cannot be re-downloaded from the source does not hold without the fingerprint of the exact file that was counted. The citation keeps the official URL.

That was not the only wall, and all four have a similar shape: the page opens in a browser and the document will not come down to a program, or there is no way to find its path. The PPEF 2027 index on the Finance Ministry's site serves HTML but exposes no links to the PDFs, whose paths carry a session token: without the path, 404; with the exact path, which came from a person, the Draft Decree came down with a 200, and the same pair of tokens later opened the analytics and the volumes. The open data mirror hosted by ATDT returned an Akamai 403 on 15 September. The OECD's press page also returns 403, though its SDMX API answers without trouble: the official figure was one endpoint away from a release that looked unreachable.

From that comes a rule the report applies throughout: the wall gets recorded, not smoothed over. When a document that is not published yet cannot be told apart from one that is blocked to clients that are not browsers, the report claims neither.

It does not claim causality between data centres and adoption: the census has a single measurement and a single measurement cannot sustain a causal claim. It does not claim the Plan is lying about Coatlicue, but that the comparison cannot be verified without the unit. It does not turn the count of AI-using units into an exact figure, because the percentage it comes from is rounded. And above all it does not claim where Mexico stands today: the census measures 2023 and there is no second Mexican measurement, so the report publishes a band and refuses to pick a number inside it. Nor does it claim that Coatlicue's construction began or that the foundation stone was laid: the Plan declares both dates and no later official document confirms them, so what the report says is that there is no confirmation, not that it did not happen. And it does not credit Crece tu MIPYME with the 841,156 digitalised firms: the report counts from three and a half months before the programme existed and does not separate the two.

Comparing two documents measured differently is not comparing. The Ministry of Economy's annual report is counted with the same method as the Plan: word roots, declared exceptions, and the literal context of each occurrence stored in the dataset. The difference is scope. For the Plan only the body is counted, trimming cover, index and bibliography, because counting the index would inflate its own terms. For the report everything is counted, cover, index and annexes included, and that is deliberate too: what holds up the chapter is an absence, and giving the document more text than it is due can only make a zero stop being one. The third is the 2027 budget's Draft Decree, also counted whole and without cuts, with two rules of its own: every whole-word term is counted twice, by substring and tolerating the spaces the extractor inserts inside words, and if they differ the count aborts; and no amount is attributed to annex rows, because the extractor separates the amounts column from the text. The only figure taken from there is the Ramo 55 total, read from the table of totals by ramo.

The volumes and the analytics from the same package come in by two roads. The programme strategies of Ramos 55 and 38 are text and are counted with the decree's rules, whole. The analytics are not counted, they are added up: the Analítico de Claves carries every budget line of the project with its amount, and the package's catalogues give each programme, unit and ministry its name. The guard is one of coincidence: the Ramo 55 total from adding up its 399 lines has to be the one in the decree's table, or curation aborts. Two documents from the same package saying the same thing by different roads is what counts here as verified. And the analytic only lists lines with an amount, so a programme without a line is published as such, not as zero pesos.

The trap that does change the result is SME. Counted as a substring it comes out 51 times, because every MSME contains it. On its own it comes out 5. The discount travels in the dataset, in the excluded mentions column, not hidden in the code: comparing an inflated 51 against the Plan's one would have been counting the same word twice to win an argument.