How Sovereign Is Sovereign Compute? A Review of 775 Non-U.S. Data Centers

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the nationality of data center operators in a dataset of 775 non-U.S. data centers to assess the implications for digital sovereignty and AI governance.

Contribution

It introduces a new dataset of non-U.S. data centers and provides initial estimates of foreign influence based on operator nationality and investment value.

Findings

U.S. companies operate 48% of non-U.S. data centers by investment value.

Data center operators can influence AI governance through foreign data center deployment.

Building data centers locally does not ensure sovereignty if operated by foreign entities.

Abstract

Previous literature has proposed that the companies operating data centers enforce government regulations on AI companies. Using a new dataset of 775 non-U.S. data center projects, this paper estimates how often data centers could be subject to foreign legal authorities due to the nationality of the data center operators. We find that U.S. companies operate 48% of all non-U.S. data center projects in our dataset when weighted by investment value - a proxy for compute capacity. This is an approximation based on public data and should be interpreted as an initial estimate. For the United States, our findings suggest that data center operators offer a lever for internationally governing AI that complements traditional export controls, since operators can be used to regulate computing resources already deployed in non-U.S. data centers. For other countries, our results show that building data centers locally does not guarantee digital sovereignty if those facilities are run by foreign entities. To support future research, we release our dataset, which documents over 20 variables relating to each data center, including the year it was announced, the investment value, and its operator's national affiliation. The dataset also includes over 1,000 quotes describing these data centers' strategic motivations, operational challenges, and engagement with U.S. and Chinese entities.