Abstract Industry 4.0 is a great opportunity and a tremendous challenge for every role of society. Our study combines complex network and qualitative methods to analyze the Industry 4.0 macroeconomic issues and global supply chain, which enriches the qualitative analysis and machine learning in macroscopic and strategic research. Unsupervised complex graph network models are used to explore how industry 4.0 reshapes the world. Based on the in-degree and out-degree of the weighted and unweighted edges of each node, combined with the grouping results based on unsupervised learning, our study shows that the cooperation groups of Industry 4.0 are different from the previous traditional alliances. Macroeconomics issues also are studied. Finally, strong cohesive groups and recommendations for businessmen and policymakers are proposed.