Cloud empires’ physical footprint
Source
U.S.-China technological rivalry presents dilemmas for third countries. Cloud computing infrastructure has become an acute front in this rivalry because of the infrastructural power that it affords over increasingly cloud-based economies, and because it is a control point in AI governance. We ask what factors explain a third country’s “cloud infrastructure alignment”—the degree to which the country’s local cloud computing infrastructure belongs to U.S. versus Chinese providers. Based on literature, we sketch three different answers: international trade, digital imperialism, and third-country strategic choice. In the first quantitative study on the topic, we test propositions derived from these views using original data on global hyperscale cloud infrastructure combined with trade statistics and security variables. We find that cloud infrastructure alignment is positively associated with other imports from the U.S. or China, negatively associated with interstate disputes, and only weakly associated with security cooperation ties. The findings suggest that commercial interests and third-country strategic choice may be more influential in shaping cloud infrastructure than any imperialist expansion or containment by the superpowers. We conclude that researchers should direct more attention to the role of third-country agency in technology geopolitics, and to the role of tech firms as autonomous geopolitical actors.