Today’s economies are critically dependent on transnational digital infrastructures and platforms. The Digital Economic Security Lab (DIESL) maps these infrastructures, assesses countries’ and sectors’ dependence on them, and explains how they are shaped by economic and political forces. Our work informs policy making and business strategy and advances academic debates in international political economy, cybersecurity, and related fields.
Our flagship project GEOCLOUD: The Geopolitics of Cloud Computing tracks the global and sectoral reach of U.S. and Chinese cloud computing infrastructures. In other work we chart the geographic distribution and ownership of compute clusters that power AI services. We believe that transformations in digital infrastructures have far-reaching consequences, because in a digitized society computational power translates to political power.
DIESL is the name of Professor Vili Lehdonvirta’s joint research group at the Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Finland, and the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. It was established in 2024 with funding from the European Research Council and the Dieter Schwarz Foundation.
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Finnish data centre census 2025
Kaarlo Liukkonen, Otto Kässi and Vili Lehdonvirta (Lue suomeksi) The data centre industry in Finland is booming. According to industry sources, potential data centre investments may add up to 30 billion euros in the next five years. At the same time, the current economic footprint of the data centre industry remains somewhat opaque. Several organisations…
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Digital Economic Security Seminar – Fall 2025
Organisers/Hosts: Vili Lehdonvirta, Philipp Riederle Sessions: Tuesdays, 1–2pm (UK time), during Oxford term time, via Zoom Participation: Open to researchers and students from any university or research institution. Please apply here if you would like to join the seminar sessions. Fall/Michaelmas Term 2025 *Eastern time is temporarily 9–10am on 28 Oct and 4 Nov, due…
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DIESL in SASE 2025
Philipp Riederle and Kaarlo Liukkonen, members of the DIESL, recently participated in the annual conference of The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), held this year in Montreal. Philipp presented two working papers: “Why is computation centralising? An economic model based on 50 years of data” co-authored with Vili Lehdonvirta, and “User Switching within…
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DIESL Summer Seminar 2025
The Digital Economic Security Lab (DIESL) wrapped up the academic year with its Summer Seminar on 26 June 2025 at Aalto University, in Espoo, Finland. The event brought together DIESL researchers from the Aalto and Oxford Universities, featuring short research presentations on topics including the geography of cloud compute, platform interoperability, the emergent frameworks for…
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Submarine cable security is all at sea, and UK govt ‘too timid’ to act, says report
“The main challenge in making meaningful governance reforms to secure submarine cables is figuring out what these could be. Making fishing or anchoring accidents illegal would be disproportionate,” says Anniki Mikelsaar
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Inside the relentless race for AI capacity
A study from Oxford university found that close to 95 per cent of commercially available AI computing power is operated by US and Chinese tech groups.
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The Global A.I. Divide –Where A.I. Data Centers Are Located
“Oil-producing countries have had an oversized influence on international affairs; in an A.I.-powered near future, compute producers could have something similar” said Vili Lehdonvirta, who conducted the research with Zoe Jay Hawkins and Boxi Wu.
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Where Chinese Or American Tech Is Used In Cloud Data Storage
Research from Vili Lehdonvirta, Boxi Wú and Zoe Hawkins at the University of Oxford and Finland’s Aalto University shows which countries are home to which kind of data centers.