America’s Digital Empire Has a Trust Problem
The Trump administration’s foreign policy is accelerating global efforts to reduce dependence on American hyperscalers—and the long-term costs to U.S. digital influence may be severe.
Over the past few decades, three U.S. companies—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud—have quietly amassed control over nearly two-thirds of global cloud infrastructure services. It is an ad hoc American empire, built through commercial logic rather than grand strategy and answering to shareholders rather than voters or bureaucrats.
The internet was built for decentralization, designed to route around damage and resist single points of failure or control. Nonetheless, a combination of convenience, cybersecurity and cost have driven most of the world onto a handful of platforms, positioning them as “hyperscalers”—great powers of digital infrastructure that operate across more countries than most international organizations.
As the footprint of these hyperscalers has increased, policymakers in Washington have found ways to serve U.S. foreign policy goals by weaponizing this digital infrastructure. In response, other nations have increasingly sought to reduce their dependence on the U.S. for their critical digital infrastructure. Technologically, their task is herculean. But one year into President Donald Trump’s second term, the sense of urgency driving their efforts has grown palpable.
An Invisible Empire
Amazon Web Services serves customers in 190 countries—just three shy of the number of U.N. member states. AWS, Google, Microsoft and Meta now account for more than 70 percent of international undersea cable capacity combined, up from less than 10 percent just over a decade ago. Hyperscalers don’t just move and store data; they maintain significant power over the pathways it travels on. They also offer integrated services and products like databases, AI training platforms, security monitoring and enterprise software.
In many respects, the hyperscalers’ sheer size has been positive for digital transformation. For governments and businesses alike, utilizing these companies’ cloud servers is economical and flexible. It guarantees investments in maintenance and cybersecurity that individual companies and many governments cannot match. When a national bank operates its ATMs and its fraud detection system using a hyperscaler’s AI tools, or a government relies on a hyperscaler’s cloud infrastructure to provide services, those systems generally operate with greater safety and stability than they would with an isolated or bespoke foundation.
Of course, such reliance also creates vulnerabilities. When one of these providers fails, the effects are felt far and wide. The AWS outage in October 2025 caused cascading failures that disrupted banking services in the U.K., grounded flights on U.S. airlines Delta and United, and crashed applications from Snapchat to Coinbase—all because of a single glitch at a data center in northern Virginia.
The outage was accidental and quickly resolved, and it represented a known risk for all users. But what happens when the disruption is deliberate and out of a company’s control? As the U.S. demonstrated with its sanctions against Russia in recent years, the impacts are lasting and profound.
What Russia Revealed
Within weeks of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle voluntarily announced they would stop accepting new Russian business, while continuing to serve existing customers there. The decision was seen as a measured and proactive demonstration of solidarity with Western democracies and a rebuke of Russia’s aggression. Yet as the war raged on, Western governments increasingly tightened sanctions against Moscow, and in June 2024 the U.S. Treasury compelled these hyperscalers to sever relations with all clients in Russia, cutting off the products and services that underpinned Russia’s digital economy.
The consequences have been severe. Even before sanctions officially hit, Russian companies were racing to migrate to a domestic infrastructure they didn’t actually have. In March 2022, Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development warned that the country might have as little as a six weeks of data storage supplies on hand. Organizations scrambling to replace Western systems created what some IT specialists called a “zoo”—a patchwork of Russian-made software and custom-built workarounds running without critical systems updates.
Three years later, the structural deficit has only deepened. As one Russian tech executive told MIT Technology Review, it was as if “20 years of Russia’s future had been taken away in a heartbeat.” Russia needs 30,000 new data center racks annually to meet demand but was projected to add just 4,600 in 2025. Cybersecurity is steadily degrading as the technological gap with global standards widens. In July 2025, hackers exploited vulnerabilities in this fragmented infrastructure at Aeroflot, Russia’s flagship airline, forcing the cancelation of dozens of flights.
America having a strongman has its benefits. The issue is having an erratic strongman.
The reason the sanctions hit hard was because they forced every key American provider to comply. In one sense that proved a victory for Western democracies: a coordinated effort that reflected decades of trans-Atlantic partnership as well as a shared strategic vision and security interests among allies. But now, as U.S. relations with traditional allies and partners falter, that success also serves as a vivid reminder of the consequences that could arise when things go south with Washington.
Seeking an Exit Strategy
From escalating trade wars to eviscerating foreign aid, invading Venezuela to demanding Greenland, Trump’s disruptive approach to foreign policy has left allies and partners viewing the U.S. government as an untrustworthy and erratic actor on the global stage. His seizure of executive power domestically—demanding allegiance from tech leaders while upending stated national security goals in response to their influence, threatening everyone from the chair of the Federal Reserve Board to elected officials in Minnesota—has only deepened that impression. Trump predictably guarantees two things: unprecedented chaos and indifference to the rule of law.
For nations whose financial systems, government services and eventual AI capabilities rely on American cloud infrastructure, this presents a strategic vulnerability at best and an existential threat at worst. The choice to escalate sanctions against Russia and weaponize that nation’s reliance on U.S. digital services was based on longstanding political alliances, ideological solidarity and international law, giving them a foundation of legitimacy. Faith that the U.S. will respect such a foundation under Trump is in increasingly short supply. At the same time, concern that the U.S. government could abruptly force American hyperscalers to comply with its demands is rising.
It is a dynamic that surfaces repeatedly in my conversations with foreign observers. “We don’t hate a strongman. We can work with them,” a political analyst in the Gulf recently told me. “America having a strongman has its benefits. The issue is having an erratic strongman.” One European minister put it even more starkly: “We’ve always known our dependence on the American companies was a risk. We never thought the United States would be a threat.”
The desire for technological independence is increasingly prompting localization efforts around the world. In late 2024, India’s central bank approved a pilot program to provide cloud data services to financial firms, challenging the dominance of Silicon Valley, though the initiative is still in its early stages. In March 2025, the Dutch Parliament passed eight motions to reduce reliance on U.S. tech companies, including one that calls for the creation of a sovereign Dutch cloud services platform. And in July 2025, the African Union’s legislative body adopted the Lusaka Declaration, which calls for “a secure, inclusive, sovereign digital and AI future”—part of Africa’s broader positioning between U.S. and Chinese infrastructure as Washington’s engagement with the continent grows more transactional.
These initiatives will be challenging to implement, for the same reasons that U.S. hyperscalers have become so ubiquitous: The economies of scale and integrated functionality create extremely high barriers to entry. And as ever, the specter of AI looms large. Achieving independence in the global AI market requires an extraordinary degree of investment across multiple layers of the technology stack: not just cloud provision, but also chips, software, human capital, data sets and data centers.
As of 2024, China has spent more than $150 billion pursuing semiconductor self-sufficiency, with still-incomplete results. Most nations can’t come close to that level of investment. What emerges instead in most of the world is likely to be a hybrid system that accepts that full autonomy is unrealistic, while full dependence on external providers is foolhardy. Technologically, American hyperscalers are positioned to compete fiercely with Chinese hyperscalers for global AI markets. Yet what used to be key differentiating factors for U.S. firms—such as freedom from government intrusion and the protections of due process—now look increasingly questionable.
It is also important to note that hyperscalers are not passive actors. They can’t control Washington, but they’re not powerless either. As AI infrastructure becomes central to national power, American companies must navigate a shifting position. Hyperscalers operate across more borders than most militaries. They can reshape societies and redefine a nation’s future. They can also be converted into instruments of state power, whether they choose to be or not.
Ultimately, these companies’ long-term survival and global influence may depend less on the deals they strike abroad in the coming years, and more on the influence they exert at home to ensure U.S. accountability for respecting democratic principles and international law. Absent leadership that other nations can trust and values they recognize as shared, U.S. commercial dominance over digital infrastructure goes from being an unfortunate limited risk to an untenable strategic vulnerability.
Colophon
Originally Published
Originally Published in World Politics Review.