Description
Strategic competition over cloud computing technologies and sovereignty claims have emerged as key dimensions of global digital politics. While extant literature has tended to overlook the relationship between states' competition over artificial intelligence and their cloud sovereignty ambitions—treating AI competition and cloud sovereignty as siloed issues--they are closely intertwined in reality. Not only are cloud infrastructure and AI technologies key components of Big Tech companies’ ‘technology stacks’, but both technologies have become strategically integrated into contemporary state approaches to ‘digital sovereignty’. Drawing upon the understudied Dutch and British policy contexts as illustrative cases, this paper advances a conceptual framework for understanding how the pursuit of particular ‘sovereign cloud’ solutions by various European states have been shaped by wider techno-geopolitical pressures, including the growing structural entanglement between cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, and states’ foreign policy goals. In so doing, I elaborate an AI-cloud sovereignty paradox in European approaches to digital sovereignty. Accordingly, this paper seeks to offer novel theoretical and empirical contributions to digital IPE scholarship by conceptualizing the ‘integrative’ features of cloud and AI technologies from a geo-economic perspective and by foregrounding the significant tensions they introduce for states’ digital sovereignty goals.
