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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Drone strikes on Gulf data centres: How geopolitics will shape the fallout
Vili Lehdonvirta Recent reporting indicates that Iranian drone strikes damaged Amazon Web Services data centres in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, causing disruption to millions of people and businesses in the Gulf region. Iranian state media claims that the data centres were deliberately targeted. This appears to be the first time a country’s armed
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Call for Papers – EISA PEC 2026
Infrastructures of Power: Materialities of Tech Autonomy in a World of Weaponised Interdependence This panel is for the European International Studies Association’s Pan-European Conference on International Relations (EISA-PEC 2026) The Conference will be held on 1-4 September 2026, in Lisbon, Portugal. More Information on EISA-PEC can be found at: https://eisa-net.org/abstract-submission-guidelines-pec-2026/ Panel Chair: Kunhan Li (Aalto
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Digital Economic Security Seminar – Winter 2026
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. Winter/Hilary Term 2026 *Different Eastern time due to the US switching to daylight saving time
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OECD collaboration on tracking AI compute
Countries count AI compute infrastructure as a strategic asset without systematically tracking its distribution, availability and access. Digital Economic Security Lab researchers Vili Lehdonvirta, Boxi Wu and Zoe Jay Hawkins collaborated with OECD researchers Celine Caira and Lucia Russo to help fill this gap by tracking and estimating the availability and global physical distribution of
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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.