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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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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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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
Digital Economic Security Lab
Professor Vili Lehdonvirta
Aalto University and University of Oxford