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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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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Most Finnish digital public services hosted by U.S. cloud providers
Jaakko Kilpi, Otto Kässi and Vili Lehdonvirta (Lue suomeksi) The Finnish Social Insurance Institution Kela and Finland’s central election information system recently announced that they were migrating digital services from on-premises hosting in Finland to cloud data centres elsewhere in Europe. Cloud hosting can increase service quality and reliability while also generating cost savings. But
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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.
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AWS outage: Are we relying too much on US big tech?
Vili Lehdonvirta, professor of technology policy at Aalto University in Finland, told the BBC that the sector, at its core, is “driven by economies of scale.”
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Amazon battles to fix web services
Professor Vili Lehdonvirta commented on the recent AWS outages on Tonight with Andrew Marr
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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