The “Sovereign Democratic Infrastructure” Hyperscalers Trick: Why We Shouldn’t Fall for It, and What We Should Do Instead

Now that the election of President Trump in the US is perceived to have lowered the threat of regulation for technology firms (whether this will be really true is another matter), there is widespread expectation in lobbying circles in London and Brussels that lobbying money is being redirected and is cascading massively onto Europe and the Global South – where governments are perceived as still eager to intervene. The money will continue to go partly to resist digital regulation in all its forms (delaying and procrastinating), but a veritable tsunami of activity is already being directed at confounding, confusing, equivocating and obfuscating around the newly fashionable “digital infrastructure” discourse. The goal is “grandfathering” and expanding existing corporate power into the future, covering the globe with data centers; the means is weaponizing well-meaning efforts in pioneering jurisdictions like India and Brazil, and exploiting governments’ general FOMO on artificial intelligence.

The realization that Europe (and much of the rest of the world outside China and Russia) is almost entirely dependent on a “tech stack” (compute, connectivity, data) owned entirely by American hyperscalers such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon is animating efforts such as #EuroStack, a movement of unaffiliated volunteers in Europe with broad support from business, experts, and civil society trying to wake up European institutions to the need for urgent action. The Draghi Report has become the bible in European policy circles for its clear-eyed diagnosis of our predicament, and for preaching the need for massive industrial policy effort in selected strategic sectors. While the new European Commission starts with major political handicaps that do not bode well for its future decisiveness and effectiveness, we are where we are, and this is our “hour of truth.” In digital (and other strategic sectors), either our institutions finally step up to support a serious public/private investment effort in European assets, or we continue to sink further into dependence and vassalage to US tech giants.

But there’s much more than this: as we witness increasing volatility, vulnerability, weaponization, and attacks that are increasingly unpredictable, we cannot look away. Europe needs to build resilience and sovereignty across all basic “infrastructure” – from energy to communications to water, critical minerals, food supply, and indeed the digital “stack.”

European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen appears to have taken on board Draghi’s mission, though the political and economic chaos that Europe is in at the moment does not bode well. Perhaps in a laudable effort to “break silos,” – the “digital agenda” is spread across three Commissioners, including Teresa Ribera, Henna Virkkunen, Stéphane Séjourné – but their “mission letters” say little that is specific about pursuing digital sovereignty with the required speed. The concern is heightened because, in a vacuum, mischief is spreading.

Three waves of mischief

In the chaos and confusion, the hyperscalers are seizing the moment with great aggression. The “promise of AI” was the first wave: the hyperbole around AI models and their “transformative” applications drowned out the discourse around ethics, discrimination, and the appropriation of value, fed the European FOMO, and created huge pent-up demand for something, anything, that could be latched on to suggest that Europe would not be terminally left behind. The Draghi Report also somehow bought into the idea that AI is the next “digital revolution” that Europe absolutely cannot miss out on – again raising levels of anxiety with politicians and institutions. The response of hyperscalers has been swift in Europe and the Global South: just wave the checkbook.

While erecting new giant data centers is difficult in the US because of environmental, energy, and land constraints, what better than to dot Europe (and the world) with vast server banks that can be fungible (i.e., provide compute for all purposes) while giving local politicians the illusion there is local investment and local activity? This fits well with the mythology that Europe needs to be redeemed by “special AI magic,” and these data centers will support our AI revolution. But there is no “AI stack” distinct from other digital applications: GPUs, compute, energy, data, connectivity. And right now, hyperscalers are going around Europe and the Global South cutting cheques to build data centers, while governments and institutions are in a lather of excitement – the European Commission and multiple Member States, the UK, South Africa, and many more unconditionally welcoming these investments and hilariously labeling them as our “sovereign” cloud.

The “second wave” of trickery is co-opting the conversation on the need to follow Draghi’s prescriptions for massive injections of investment in Europe. Europe (and other parts of the world) is waking up to the fact that 80-90% of our digital infrastructure is owned by the same US tech giants we are pursuing (not very successfully) with regulation of apps and services, and we have a massive investment deficit in this space.

Here again, hyperscalers are waving their checkbooks and telling us we can call their investment “sovereign infrastructure” – of course, they are on our soil. “Sovereign!!” Who owns it? Who has the kill switch? Who gets all the data, and where does it go? The answer is clear, yet the “sovereign cloud” in Italy is Google Cloud, and Amazon just announced a big investment there. Microsoft is doing the same and more across Europe and the globe – from South East Asia to Latin America to Africa. The illusion of a “sovereign cloud” is boosted by marketing and press releases that announce to the unsuspecting public that ‘this investment will contribute gazillions to GDP and thousands of jobs, and accelerate the digital transformation.’

The “third wave” is in the making, but the signs are already everywhere. While European governments and institutions are desperately eager for some good news to help them say Europe is also “doing something on AI,” the Global South is the target of another bit of trickery. “Competitiveness” is not the right narrative there – the more appropriate one is “inclusiveness and democracy.” So what is happening before our eyes is a huge lobbying operation that is designed to conflate and appropriate and coopt – again with the ultimate commercial objective of installing yet more data centers in these countries to reap the benefits. Nothing to do with inclusiveness and democracy – that’s just the pretext. In reality, here’s what’s happening:

• With help from local philanthropy, India has accomplished the incredible feat of putting in place (fast and at a massive scale) a collection of “building blocks” (digital identity, digital payments, data exchange) for providing its vast and diverse population with the means to be digitally identifiable and banked. These basic building blocks – which connect citizens and businesses ultimately with the State – are foundational to multiple digital services being built on top – from mobility to ecommerce all the way to fintech to green energy. Brazil has also been involved in an effort to develop autonomous building blocks of its own, including digital identity, digital wallets, and payment systems to support digital transactions and services.
• The “India stack” model (as it is sometimes described) is an evolving effort that progressed organically across building blocks, but is only recently turning attention to ways of reducing dependency from hyperscalers not by building giant datacentres but by federating smaller assets.
• India Stack has become the global reference for “digital public infrastructure” and enthusiastically adopted by supernational institutions – IMF, G20 – as a model to follow. But it is also being co-opted aggressively by hyperscalers through their “benevolent proxies.” The likes of the Gates Foundation and the Tony Blair Institute (funded by multiple tech billionaires in their “private” capacities) are showering funds on large and small civil society groups, consultants, and academics to proselytize around the notion that the Indian model is “the” aspirational model the Global South should adopt, as a beacon for “democracy and inclusiveness.” It is hard not to see that behind these seemingly benign intentions, there are the usual suspects with their checkbooks, building local and, of course, “sovereign” data centers. The effort to sell “DPI in a box” is vast and capillary: all sorts of well-meaning civil society groups interested in democracy and inclusiveness for the Global South have accepted to become accomplices in this effort, turning a blind eye to the real motivation and being silenced by the need to get funding.
• There is a whole circus underway of well-meaning civil society outlets becoming advertisers for this effort, in cahoots with European outreach institutions also having become traveling salesmen for Big Tech’s notion of “India Stack,” putting on it the European stamp of approval; independent voices (like mine) are being offered the chance to collaborate in this wonderful, selfless effort (and presumably silenced in the process).

What is going on? Why aren’t we seeing this?

#EuroStack is not the same as “digital public infrastructure”

#EuroStack is a movement e to create alternative assets across the digital value chain – for security, resilience, and growth reasons. Putting in place the conditions for European assets to be created and federated, providing competitive alternatives to US hyperscalers, is not something we can look away from in a world in which we need to worry about Europe’s autonomy but also its ability to support businesses without creating deeper dependencies from the same US infrastructure companies.

The effort is underway to support this vision. And in this effort, it is important we are not distracted and confused by the “siren voices” of hyperscalers waving checkbooks, enabled and abetted by small civil society outfits struggling to make ends meet and the moral dilemma of accepting funding, and government institutions being seduced by money and power.

This is ultimately a patriotic effort, a word in disuse in Europe but one which is used without any shame in the US. For the better, in my view – what is wrong with being “patriotic” and pushing for Europe to do more of its own thing? It is not an adversarial move but one for choice and autonomy in a world in which dependencies are not going to end well.

And in this effort, we should not be confused by voices inside institutions that pretend all we have in mind with EuroStack is just “a version of DPI,” and they are already “working on it.” DPI, as generally referred to today, is a collection of building blocks (protocols built on open standards and interoperability) to connect citizens and businesses with the State and enable the delivery of services while embedding fundamental rights and freedoms. It does not involve any expectation of “public ownership” of services or a State role: rather, enabling private innovation and growth on top of these “rails.” It is also not equivalent to the notion of “digital commons” – a commons-based, “broader” version of DPI than one that includes “just” foundational capabilities for the relationship between citizen, business, and state. There is work underway (though it is difficult to appraise progress) on a new digital wallet to allow citizens inter alia to control their data. But the aspiration should be much higher: an industrial policy that supports investment, startups, and business while also preserving fundamental values of governance needs to include multiple additional blocks in the supply chain: software, compute, connectivity, and chips. Investment in the creation and federation of existing assets – not to replace entirely Big Tech’s assets, we are too dependent and we cannot, but at least to create competing supply – is critical and needs to be promoted and coordinated by consistent policy and co-investment.

This is the objective of the #EuroStack movement, which has gathered support in Parliament and increasingly in business and the public conversation around our vulnerabilities in a much more uncertain and weaponized world.

What should we do instead?

The question I often get is, “but what should governments do when hyperscalers come in and wave checks? Isn’t it impossible to turn this down?” Of course it is. But we should not be Pollyanna-ish on where this money comes from, where it goes, and its motivation. When asking hyperscalers what is their best narrative for why “the world should be unconcerned at their activities,” they invariably respond with something along the lines of “to train AI model you need forests of GPUs, oceans of compute, huge data lakes and lots of money – we have it, suck it up.” To anyone who points out this fatalism does not address the problem of dependence on a very concentrated foreign infrastructure for all of Europe’s online activities, the answer is equally dumb: “but China,” (i.e., if you weaken us, then you will weaken the West’s resistance to China and fall into their orbit), and “but arent’s telcos and electric utilities also concentrated? What’s the difference?” If we are prepared to ignore two decades of expansion, domination, and entrenchment which extends to all spheres of life, including democratic discourse, then perhaps none. For anyone alive in the last two decades who has witnessed the massive appropriation of power and the decimation of competition and quality information, a lot.

As the US turns inward – refocusing on domestic issues – Europe now has a unique opportunity not to be solely obsessing over the regulation of apps and services by digital giants but instead be at the center of a network of initiatives across the world, all aimed at building an autonomous, independent and sovereign digital infrastructure. From India to Brazil to Singapore to Estonia to Argentina and Japan, much is underway that is not just the adoption of “DPI in a box.” Europe should be at the heart of this network: we have talent, money, and ideas; what is missing is institutional support of the “right” kind instead of bending the knee to hyperscalers (the recent spectacle of the UK being particularly unedifying in this respect: Britain must treat tech giants like nation states, minister warns).

In short

Stay tuned for more on #EuroStack, but let’s not fall for the hyperscalers’ trickery and dissimulation; let’s give a hard time to governments and institutions that aid and abet their rapacious instincts and pretend to be working on strategic autonomy for Europe when they are emphatically not, and let’s connect with other jurisdictions across the globe engaged in similar efforts.

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