Former Professor of Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research
Vili Lehdonvirta is an expert on the politics and economics of digital platforms. His current research focuses on the geopolitics and geoeconomics of digital infrastructures.
Today’s economies are critically dependent on transnational digital infrastructures and platforms, which enable the seamless flow of data, communication, and commerce across borders.
From cloud computing and global payment systems to social media and e-commerce platforms, these interconnected systems underpin critical economic activities and services.
The Digital Economic Security Lab (DIESL) maps these infrastructures, assesses countries’ and sectors’ dependence on them, and explains how they are shaped by economic and political forces. Our work informs policy making and business strategy and advances academic debates in international political economy, cybersecurity, and related fields.
Our flagship project GEOCLOUD: The Geopolitics of Cloud Computing tracks the global and sectoral reach of U.S. and Chinese cloud computing infrastructures. In other work, we chart the geographic distribution and ownership of compute clusters that power AI services. We believe that transformations in digital infrastructures have far-reaching consequences, because in a digitized society computational power translates to political power.
DIESL is the name of Professor Vili Lehdonvirta’s joint research group at the Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Finland, and the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. It was established in 2024 with funding from the European Research Council and the Dieter Schwarz Foundation.
DIESL plays a pivotal role in analysing and informing public discourse on the geopolitical and economic ramifications of digital infrastructure and technology monopolies. For example:
The shift to cloud represents a reversal of the 1980s personal computing revolution: computation is moving from personal devices back into large, centralized facilities. This project seeks to understand the economic drivers of this reversal.
This project aims to map where in the world the data centers that make up the computational infrastructure of AI research are located and who owns them. It will also investigate government policies aimed at shaping this geography.
DPhil Student
Philipp researches instruments to distribute the power of digital platform monopolists. He analyses the effects of vertical separation and interoperability in decentralised platform ecosystems.
DPhil Student
Mimmi's DPhil research focuses on the political economy of public sector artificial intelligence projects. She's interested in how technology is reshaping economic structures of societies.
DPhil Student
Divya is the co-founder of the Collective Intelligence Project, which advances collective intelligence capabilities for the effective governance of transformative technologies.
