DPI promises greater sovereign control over digital infrastructure, reducing geopolitical dependencies and fostering self-determination.
Even countries with significant financial resources and the most developed digital sectors rely on complex international trade flows. These supply chains are characterized by monopolies, export controls and bottlenecks, particularly in cloud infrastructure and semiconductors. To a lesser extent, these restrictions also impact the availability of telecommunications equipment and critical minerals. Consequently, in provisioning technology stacks, most nations are dependent on foreign software providers, equipment and talent.
While self-sufficiency in this regard is likely impossible even for so-called ‘technology superpowers’, greater sovereignty – as measured by a country’s capacity to build and shape the technology it depends on – is eminently achievable. In recent years, in a push to strengthen sovereignty, numerous countries have reassessed both the costs and the long-term stability of their foreign technology dependencies. Singapore, Vietnam, Nigeria and Kenya have legislated that the data of their citizens must be stored in-country. In addition, dozens of countries have passed laws to regulate multinational digital service providers in an attempt to correct previous failures related to stewardship of their societies, markets or citizens’ lives online. European technology sovereignty was a core theme at the AI Action Summit in 2025, with President Macron later warning that, ‘We cannot depend on a few American companies to manage our data infrastructure, it’s a matter of European public interest… there is no such thing as happy vassalage.’
Government innovation for public good has been at the forefront of DPI developments to date. A typical DPI approach will see governments pursuing digital projects that resolve an identifiable societal need.
In 2016, the National Payments Corporation of India, an Indian state-owned organization, developed Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a digital system that enables instant mobile payments. This DPI, presented as a way to make the financial system more accessible to citizens, was also driven by political imperatives to establish sovereign foundations for the country’s domestic digital economy. IndiaPay, one of the payment apps enabled by UPI, now serves over half a billion users, reducing transaction dependencies by processing payments in-country and tackling the dominance of monopoly players in the Indian digital payment sector.
Sovereign ambitions also informed Estonia’s X-Road project that enables and shapes the secure flow of data in the country: leaving the data of citizens more accessible to the state and government-approved businesses, and less accessible to those beyond its national borders. Given the threat posed by neighbouring Russia, Estonia is the first country to set up a ‘Data Embassy’, as part of a contingency plan to ensure digital continuity for its citizens. Located in Luxembourg and under heavy security, this data centre comes under Estonian jurisdiction (as would be the case for a physical embassy), through a new international law concept inspired by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The X-Road platform is both secure and built on open-source technology, which enables private companies and governments in over 100 countries – such as Japan (in the energy sector), Germany (for medical prescriptions) and Brazil (in public service delivery across states) – to use the system to simplify and modernize services as well as reinforce sovereignty.
Given the threat posed by neighbouring Russia, Estonia is the first country to set up a ‘Data Embassy’, as part of a contingency plan to ensure digital continuity for its citizens.
In another example of government-led innovation, Martha Lane Fox, the then-UK digital champion, spearheaded a project to create a digital platform to facilitate public services in the UK, which resulted in the gov.uk website in 2012. Under the UK’s innovative Open Government Licence (OGL), the website has formed the basis for government-run digital services in dozens of other countries, including Canada. According to Ross Ferguson, the former director of platforms in the Canadian Digital Service, the success of the website stands out as ‘an example of what is possible when governments invest in digital public goods and infrastructure’. Shortly after coming to power, the current UK Labour government announced its plans to bring together three digital initiatives – the Government Digital Service (GDS), Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) and Incubator for AI (i.AI) – under the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, in order to unite efforts to improve digital public services and boost innovation.
The UK government’s consolidation of digital initiatives under one department is indicative of the value now placed on the development of technology solutions and the promise of emerging technology. Governments around the world have identified AI as a critical part of the global digital economy, domestic economic competitiveness and national security, as well as a force shaping politics, culture and education. There is debate over whether governments have the capacity to build or scale AI technologies when compared to private sector providers. But there is a growing realization that government-owned datasets, and data gathered from AI users, give government-backed AI technologies a unique advantage, because the data is high quality, legitimate (legally obtained) and tied to real everyday uses.
The UK’s AI Opportunities Action Plan identifies ‘Sovereign AI compute [computational power], owned and/or allocated by the public sector’ as the infrastructure that ‘will enable the UK to quickly and independently allocate compute to national priorities.’ More broadly, the Public AI Network – an organization that promotes the use of AI for the public good – has highlighted the significant moves made by Europe, Canada, Japan, India and Singapore in pursuit of public, sovereign AI. Furthermore, through its own recent AI action plan, the US has prioritized its role in setting digital technical standards for open AI models where the country currently lags behind China, whose DeepSeek, Kimi, MiniMax and Qwen AI models all rank highly in global AI indexes.
Strengthening state sovereignty over digital technologies is not without its risks. Digital technologies are vulnerable to authoritarian abuse and overreach. For example, digital payments are more easily surveilled; single digital identities raise questions about how citizens are profiled or subjected to social scoring, such as in China’s Social Credit System; and the collection of biometric data has obvious applications in controversial policing practices, like automated facial recognition. To date, DPI innovations have centred on technology in service of a modern, digital society, and while they have largely been built with public benefit in mind, they remain open to misuse. As such, democratic oversight, legal safeguards and meaningful public accountability are just as essential in governing DPI as they are in any other domain of public infrastructure, as was the case even before the digital age.
There are limits to technology sovereignty that a DPI approach cannot resolve. Where dependencies run wide and deep, with entrenched incumbents and high capital investment requirements – as is the case for cloud computing, for instance – governments must temper their sovereign ambitions. While Europe’s GAIA-X cloud infrastructure is in principle an important project, it is not close to being considered a viable alternative to US providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft’s Azure. Moreover, the UK’s long-running battle with technology firms over the rollout of end-to-end encryption – such as the Apple and WhatsApp legal cases – highlights both the limitations of regulation as a path to sovereignty and the limits that advances in technology can impose on sovereignty. Some fear that this pattern may be repeated in the future with advanced AI. Finally, ensuring digital systems are resilient to abuse and exclusion, regardless of how they have been built and deployed, remains a first-order governance challenge.
Nevertheless, faced with an unpredictable and insecure geopolitical environment, middle powers and developing countries have prioritized increased national and regional sovereignty over the technology stacks they implement. DPI approaches offer a tested route to meeting these ambitions. DPI is also a soft power mechanism that exporting countries can exercise for greater influence on the global stage. For example, had China, rather than the US, been the driving force behind the internet, the core principles of freedom of expression, open access and user privacy that today shape many digital societies of the world might have looked rather different.
