Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has emerged as one of the most prominent policy instruments through which states, particularly in the Global South, seek to translate digital sovereignty commitments into operational practice.
The DPI approach centres on foundational digital systems (identity, payments, data exchange) built on open standards, open-source software, and interoperable architectures, with the explicit aim of enabling states to exercise genuine authority over the technologies their societies depend on, rather than outsourcing that authority to foreign commercial providers (Massally, Matthan & Chaudhuri, 2023; Varma et al., 2024). By moving from siloed, vendor-specific solutions to shared public infrastructure, DPI promises to convert digital dependency into digital choice, restoring, in principle, the conditions for critical systems to be governed in the interests of the communities they serve (TechPolicy.Press, 2025).
The structural irony of this promise is that DPI systems require substantial cloud computing capacity to function at scale, and for most governments deploying DPI to reduce foreign dependency, that capacity runs on the very same hyperscalers identified above: Microsoft, Amazon, and Google (Rest of World, 2026). India’s own case is telling, while the India Stack represents domestically designed and governed foundational systems, the cloud and AI backend sustaining those systems is provided by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Nvidia (TechPolicy.Press, 2025). These companies have responded to the sovereignty moment not by retreating but by expanding, launching “sovereign cloud” offerings that repackage dependency as a product feature (Lawfare, 2025), deploying them directly in markets where governments are undertaking DPI programmes (Fierce Network, 2024). The concept of sovereignty that mainstream DPI discourse mobilises also sits in tension with the pluralist, community-rooted understanding described above.
Dominant DPI framings operate from a Westphalian, state-centred conception: sovereignty as the capacity of national governments to assert control and set the terms of digital governance within their territory (Pohle & Thiel, 2020). As Pohle (2024) argues, this framing displaces other legitimate sovereignty claims, from sub-national communities, civil society, and indigenous peoples, that the broader concept could and should accommodate. The sovereignty DPI delivers is sovereignty for the state, often mediated through infrastructure that remains, at its operational core, in someone else’s hands.
References
Fierce Network (2024) ‘Google, AWS, Microsoft invest in sovereign cloud in Asia-Pac’, 11 July. https://www.fierce-network.com/cloud/google-aws-microsoft-invest-sovereign-cloud-asia-pac
Lawfare (2025) ‘Tech’s “Sovereignty Washing” in Europe Will Ripple in the Global South’, 9 October. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/tech-s—sovereignty-washing—in-europe-will-ripple-in-the-global-south
Massally, K.N., Matthan, R. and Chaudhuri, R. (2023) ‘What is the DPI Approach?’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 15 May. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2023/05/what-is-the-dpi-approach
Pohle, J. (2024) ‘Unthinking Digital Sovereignty’, Policy & Internet, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.437
Pohle, J. and Thiel, T. (2020) ‘Digital sovereignty’, Internet Policy Review, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1532
Rest of World (2026) ‘India AI Impact Summit pitches “third way” beyond U.S. and China’, 11 February. https://restofworld.org/2026/india-ai-summit-third-way-global-south-big-tech/
TechPolicy.Press (2025) ‘India’s Digital Infrastructure Is Going Global. What Kind of Power Is It Building?’, 22 July. https://www.techpolicy.press/indias-digital-infrastructure-is-going-global-what-kind-of-power-is-it-building/
Varma, P. et al. (2024) The Future of Digital Public Infrastructure, Carnegie India. https://carnegie-production-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/files/The_Future_of_Digital_Public_Infrastructure-_A_Thesis_for_Rapid_Global_Adoption-1.pdf