Mapping Interstate Trust: The Strategic Geography of Data Centres

As data and computing power become the foundations of global economic and security systems, data centres are emerging as the next layer of critical infrastructure, integral to artificial intelligence, finance, defence, and communications. Like energy networks or undersea cables, they are increasingly built, financed, and operated across borders, creating new forms of dependence and exposure between states.

Most current analysis examines data centres through technical and environmental factors, focusing on energy efficiency, sustainability, and computing capacity. While these considerations are important, they capture only a fraction of the insight needed to build data centres. Though policy discussions have expanded in recent years, examining issues such as data localisation, national security, and digital sovereignty, this work remains largely case-specific: valuable in isolation, but rarely connected to a broader picture. What remains missing is a systematic view of how these choices interact and what they collectively signal about international relationships.

Where data centres are located, and under whose legal and regulatory regimes they operate, reflects how states assess one another’s reliability and institutional strength. This is especially true for state-led or state-regulated projects, where decisions to co-develop facilities reflect judgements about political stability, regulatory credibility, and long-term trust.

Policymakers should treat the geography of data centres as an additional source of strategic awareness, a means to understand how trust, alignment, and dependence are structured across jurisdictions. Read systematically, these patterns can help governments evaluate how their digital ties reinforce or complicate broader diplomatic objectives, offering a clearer picture of how trust is built and managed in the digital age.

1. Reading the Geography of Trust

The global distribution of data centres follows familiar economic and technical logic: access to affordable energy, stable networks, fiscal incentives, and industry proximity. Yet these factors alone cannot explain where facilities are located, particularly when they involve state-led partnerships. Political judgements about reliability and alignment jointly determine who hosts critical compute and who does not.

Hosting a foreign hyperscale or sovereign cloud facility is therefore more than an investment decision. It demonstrates trust in the host’s stability, legal standards, and capacity to manage sensitive data.

Hosting a foreign hyperscale or sovereign cloud facility is therefore more than an investment decision. It demonstrates trust in the host’s stability, legal standards, and capacity to manage sensitive data. Conversely, restrictions on foreign cloud providers or the enforcement of localisation mandates signal limited trust and a preference for sovereignty.

Since such hosting decisions involve long-term contractual, financial, physical, and legal commitments, their geography often reveals deeper trust than short-term diplomatic statements or trade flows. Viewed globally, these choices can be read as a ‘Digital Confidence Map’:

1. Concentration and clustering of facilities show where institutional trust in legal and regulatory systems is high.
2. Absences or withdrawals indicate where trust has weakened or never existed.
3. Shifts in hosting patterns, such as new regional build-outs or cancellations, suggest changing alignments or perceptions of risk.

Other signals, such as data-flow agreements, adequacy decisions, or cybersecurity cooperation, help explain why these patterns form. However, the geography itself remains the clearest indicator: where compute capacity is physically placed reflects how states assess one another’s governance and predictability. When such trust takes material form through shared infrastructure, it becomes a measure of confidence, an observable record of where states are willing to extend reliance beyond their borders.

2. Digital Confidence Map in Practice

Today, global capacity remains concentrated in a few hub states (mainly the United States, China, and parts of Western Europe), whose control over data flows provides both economic and political leverage. Tracking how this concentration changes over time reveals how standards and influence are evolving.

Equally important is how other states position themselves within or between these hubs. Over the past year, the governments of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Singapore, and Brazil have made targeted decisions to host specific providers, negotiate selective cloud-sovereignty partnerships, or impose localisation rules. These choices reflect assessments of which partners can be trusted, how much dependence is acceptable, and how to maintain strategic flexibility.

Analysing such a map could reveal three dimensions of these dynamics: first, which states are deepening alignment with the United States (US), China, or regional systems; second, how closely governments are connected through shared infrastructure or reciprocal hosting; and third, where states diversify partnerships to balance influence and limit exposure.

Together, these indicators move analysis of the digital order beyond a US versus China binary, showing how a wider range of actors form overlapping networks of alignment built on selective trust.

The relationship between the European Union (EU) and the UAE illustrates this process in practice. Both actors are expanding their digital infrastructure networks but through distinct institutional models: the EU builds trust through legal and regulatory certainty, while the UAE demonstrates it through its investment scale and operational reliability. Their joint data centre projects in France and Italy show how these different pathways to reliability can converge into functional confidence. European partners accept UAE investment for its know-how and efficiency, while Emirati partners show they can operate within stringent European compliance frameworks. This cooperation is not incidental; rather, it represents an alignment made visible through infrastructure. On a Digital Confidence Map, such links would stand out as connectors between governance systems, revealing where trust has become mutual enough to support shared capacity and where future disagreements would need to be managed within that interdependence.

3. A Case for Extracting Insight

Extending this approach beyond individual cases would make it possible to observe how digital interdependence is taking shape globally and how it interacts with national efforts to maintain control. The US, China, and parts of Western Europe continue to dominate global capacity, but other states, such as the UAE, are building connections across multiple systems. These linkages will shape future relationships and should not be analysed in isolation. Each new facility shifts the balance of trust and influence across the digital economy.

Once infrastructure is shared, it becomes part of the political relationship between states, where dependence on a foreign cloud or compute provider connects domestic resilience to external governance and stability. When that trust weakens, policy responses follow.

Simultaneously, more than three-quarters of countries have now introduced some form of data-localisation measures, reflecting a growing tension between trust and sovereignty. Domestic control can strengthen resilience but may also limit openness. Analysing where localisation coexists with cross-border cooperation would help identify which governments are managing this balance and which are turning inward. Once infrastructure is shared, it becomes part of the political relationship between states, where dependence on a foreign cloud or compute provider connects domestic resilience to external governance and stability. When that trust weakens, policy responses follow.

Developing a consolidated view of these relationships would allow policymakers to assess three dimensions of interdependence: the level of exposure to foreign operators in critical infrastructure; the emergence of regional coalitions capable of shaping standards; and early signs of strain where regulatory barriers or provider withdrawals suggest declining confidence. Much of this information already exists across public filings and regulatory disclosures. The missing step is to organise it into a coherent analytical framework.

The value of a Digital Confidence Map therefore lies in clarity, not prediction. For governments, such visibility provides a factual basis to assess whether their digital dependencies reinforce or complicate their foreign policy goals and to identify where recalibration may be needed.

Ana Blatnik is a policy professional currently working at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence.