For his master’s thesis, DIESL team member Kaarlo Liukkonen was awarded a Rajapinta’s 2025 thesis grant. The work, titled “Competing clouds: U.S.-China tech rivalry and the geoeconomic turn”, analyses job advertisement data to measure cloud demand in 32 countries and to what extent there has been a “geoeconomic turn” in cloud computing.
The study finds that while the US dominates the market by far, the small but steady demand for Chinese cloud services does not point towards a geoeconomic shift characterised by national and regional prioritisation. Kaarlo’s thoughts on how computing infrastructures touch upon questions of power are further laid out in a related Rajapinta research note. Congratulations to Kaarlo and best wishes for his PhD studies at the Digital Economic Security Lab!
Read Kaarlo Liukkonen’s thesis here and his blog post (in Finnish) here.