DIESL member Otto Kässi presented the paper “Unplugging from Weaponised Networks: Regulations’ Impacts on Data center Buildout” at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Boston, held on 3–6 September 2026. The paper, co-authored with Kunhan Li and Vili Lehdonvirta, was presented in the session ‘Next Steps in Network Approaches to International Relations’.
The paper studies whether governments can shape where cloud computing happens, and who controls it. Cloud computing, AI and more traditional digital services such as authentication, content delivery and personalisation ultimately depend on physical data centres. At the same time, much of this infrastructure is owned and operated by firms based outside the countries where the services are used.
The presentation brought together two related studies. The first examines restrictions on cross-border data transfers and finds that tighter rules can lead to additional local data-centre investment in high-income countries, while similar effects are not visible in lower-income countries. This suggests that market size matters for whether countries can use regulation to shift the geography of computing infrastructure.
The second study looks at ownership and control. It is often the case that a country may host substantial computing capacity while still depending heavily on foreign operators, especially US firms.
Using data on demand and supply side industrial policies, the paper examines whether governments can change this pattern. Demand-side policies are associated with a shift towards more locally owned data-centre sites, but this result applies to siting, not capacity. Larger hyper-scale capacity is largely irresponsive to policy change
The APSA session placed this work in a broader discussion of network approaches to international relations. For DIESL, the paper connects research on digital infrastructure with questions about economic security, international dependence and the limits governments face when trying to affect digital infrastructure using regulation.