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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EERO LINDBOHM AND JOHAN VAN DER MEER JOIN DIESL
In March, Eero Lindbohm and Johan van der Meer joined DIESL as master thesis workers. Eero is a student of Aalto’s Master programme in Information Networks. His thesis deals with the analysis and mitigation of risks to “sovereign” cloud solutions. Johan is a student of Aalto’s Computer, Communication and Information Sciences Master programme. At DIESL,
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NEW POLICY BRIEF: EUROPE’S USE OF CLOUD COMPUTING FOR BORDER CONTROL
A new policy piece by Stefka Schmid has been published by the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. Summary Big Tech companies provide cloud computing services to various actors worldwide, including Frontex, thereby shaping the governance of the EU’s external borders. Given that border control constitutes a safety-critical environment, the implementation of cloud computing should be
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PARTICIPATION IN AI GOVERNANCE IN MLOPS MEETUP HELSINKI
On April 7th, DIESL PhD student and team member Ana Paula Gonzalez Torres will take part in the MLOps Meetup. Ana Paula will contribute with her expertise in AI governance to the question of how to implement governance to AIOps/MLOps. The event is organised by the Helsinki MLOps Community and will take place at the
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NEW WORKING PAPER: MASTODON USER STUDY ON THE POTENTIALS AND LIMITS OF INTEROPERABILITY
A new paper titled “Does Digital Platform Interoperability Deliver on Its Expectations? Evidence from User Switching on Mastodon” by Philipp Riederle has been published on SocArXiv. Abstract Users of centralised digital platforms (e.g., X, Instagram, TikTok) have little choice but to accept incumbent providers’ conduct or forgo participation. Digital platform interoperability is widely proposed as
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‘It means missile defence on datacentres’: drone strikes raise doubts over Gulf as AI superpower
“If that’s the case then from now on we might perhaps see operators of prominent datacentres like AWS [Amazon Web Services] investing in air defence, similar to how shipping operators armed up against pirates,” Lehdonvirta said.
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Amazon says drones damaged three facilities in UAE and Bahrain
Vili Lehdonvirta, professor of technology policy at Aalto University, told BBC News it appeared to be the first time such cloud infrastructure had been “knocked down by military action”
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The US turns back to nuclear power
Vili Lehdonvirta, professor of technology policy at Aalto University, Finland, points out that ‘from a military perspective, tech giants and their data centres support governments by storing and using AI to process vast amounts of information
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Africa’s digital infrastructure gap demands further attention
“Grid stability and also the stability of the policy environment are very important factors in data centre location decisions,” says Vili Lehdonvirta, professor of technology policy at Finland’s Aalto University.