Mid-century style poster of a stepped pyramid climbing into a burst of orange, pink and violet sunrays

Nine sizes of PPP

The PPP pyramid

Every PPP sits somewhere on a scale of nine sizes, each ten times the last, from a $10,000 Nano PPP to a $1 trillion Cosmic PPP. Big ideas start small, because a project that costs little can be built, measured and fixed again and again.

See the nine sizes Read the story

9: sizes of PPP, from a $10,000 Nano PPP to a $1 trillion Cosmic PPP
10×: bigger with every step up the pyramid
100M×: from the bottom of the pyramid to the top
100: nano PPPs for the price of one mini PPP

The sizes

From a tank sensor to a continent

The pyramid shape shows where the projects are. The base has room for a very large number of small ones, and the top has room for only a few giants. The pictures below show what each size can look like.

Cosmic PPP$1 trillion
Terra PPP$100 billion
Giga PPP$10 billion
Mega PPP$1 billion
Metro PPP$100 million
Urban PPP$10 million
Mini PPP$1 million
Micro PPP$100,000
Nano PPP$10,000

The base

Where the learning happens

Nano PPP
$10,000
Size 1 of 9
Sensors on a school’s water tank, a pilot app, solar panels for one school or a test of a new kind of contract. One person can understand the whole project in an afternoon, so a failure is cheap and easy to explain.
Micro PPP
$100,000
Size 2 of 9
A solar roof and battery for a clinic, or leak sensors across the pipes of a whole town. A small company, a municipality and a local bank work together, and the first real contracts get written here.
Mini PPP
$1 million
Size 3 of 9
A solar-powered pumping station, a few electric buses on one route or a cold store for farmers. It runs long enough to show real numbers, and banks want to see exactly those numbers before they lend more.

The middle

Where teams learn to work together

Urban PPP
$10 million
Size 4 of 9
Street lighting for a district, a market hall or a small water plant. Several contractors work side by side, and how the team organizes itself starts to matter as much as the technology.
Metro PPP
$100 million
Size 5 of 9
A bus line across a city, a large solar farm or a modern hospital. Banks, engineers and the government work together for years under a long contract.
Mega PPP
$1 billion
Size 6 of 9
A port terminal, a toll bridge or a big water plant. A consortium, a group of companies that join forces, builds it because no single company holds all the skills and all the money.

The top

Projects the size of countries

Giga PPP
$10 billion
Size 7 of 9
A national rail network, a chain of ports and logistics zones or a string of power stations. It works like a program of dozens of contracts across many sites, built in stages.
Terra PPP
$100 billion
Size 8 of 9
A power grid for a whole country, or a new region of cities. It crosses governments and generations, and very few countries have built anything this large.
Cosmic PPP
$1 trillion
Size 9 of 9
The infrastructure of a whole continent built as one linked program, with satellites, data centers, robots and an operating system such as EarthOS running it.

Rapid, cheap iteration

One million dollars buys one mini PPP, or 100 nano PPPs

A country that runs 100 nano projects in a year gets 100 different answers: which contract works, which sensor survives the desert heat, which village group keeps a system running. A country that spends the same money studying one big project gets one answer, years later. The price of one giga PPP would pay for a million nano projects.

01
Build small
Start with a project that costs little and can be built in weeks, so the first version exists before the study of a large one would be finished.
02
Measure everything
A few sensors cost very little. They show what the project saves, what it costs to run and how often it breaks.
03
Fix what the numbers show
Change the design, the contract or the price, and build the next version. A small mistake is cheap to fix and teaches something every time.
04
Repeat, or climb
Run the loop again until it works. Then copy the project ten times and step up to the next size.

Large projects are slow because they have to be. Design takes about 12 months, construction about 36 months and operation 20 years, so every lesson from a large project takes years to arrive. A nano PPP can be built in weeks.

A loop that keeps getting faster

Three technologies make every step cheaper

Shortens the measuring

Artificial intelligence

AI reads the sensor data the moment it arrives and prepares the studies, contracts and tenders, so a team sees on Tuesday what used to show up in a report next year.

Shortens the building

Robotics

Factories that make standard parts and robots that lay, weld and print them in place lower the cost of the next copy, and the one after that.

Shortens the funding

Tokenization

A $10,000 project is too small for most banks and just the right size for many small investors. Ownership split into tiny shares lets a neighborhood own a piece of its own solar roof.

Climbing the pyramid

Ten times bigger, never more

When a nano project works, the team does not jump to a billion dollars. It copies the project ten times and runs a micro PPP, then copies that ten times and runs a mini PPP. Each step is only ten times bigger than something already proven, so the risk of any single leap stays small.

By the time a team reaches the mega size, it has run the same pattern dozens of times at smaller sizes. The contracts have been tested, the sensors have survived real summers and the people know how to work together.

Think of the planet’s infrastructure as the world’s biggest computer. Every nano PPP adds one more sensor and one more lesson to it, and EarthOS shares what it learns, so a fix found on a village water tank in Jordan can protect every tank like it on Earth.

Where it starts

Jordan can start at the bottom today

$86B: of PPP and infrastructure projects in development across Jordan
$46B: of them in Aqaba

Article 15 of Jordan’s PPP Law lets any private company take its own PPP idea to the government directly, so a team with a $10,000 idea can start without waiting for a ministry to put it out to tender. Pick one small thing to measure this month, write down what it costs and what it teaches, and share the result with the people around you.

Small PPPs and research labs Unsolicited proposals Read the blog post