How ‘sovereignty-as-a-service’ became a pillar of modern warfare

In late September 2022, a Ukrainian attack against the Russian fleet was underway. Unmanned submarines were headed for Sevastopol to destroy Russian naval ships at anchor, but the submarines never reached their target – not because of Russian countermeasures but because SpaceX and Elon Musk had refused to activate Starlink satellites over Crimea. The Ukrainian military felt the immediate impacts of the deep entanglement between digital infrastructures and state sovereignty that the war has put into high relief. 

Far from the frontlines, a new kind of power has emerged. A power exercised not by states, but by large tech corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, and SpaceX and their owners. These defence industrial actors can no longer simply be reined in by governments via conventional public-private partnerships. Big Tech is fundamentally reshaping what it means to govern, to defend, and even to exist as a sovereign state in the digital age.

Cloud infrastructures and the geography of war

When Ukraine’s government turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft to safeguard its public data in the days after Russia invaded in February 2022, it was doing far more than adopting a cloud storage solution. The decision effectively relocated key national functions and services – from 42 government authorities, 24 universities, and dozens of companies – to data centres in Germany, France, and Sweden. These physical sites were beyond Ukraine’s borders, yet essential to its war effort.

This distribution of digital infrastructure creates an unsettling paradox. On the one hand, Ukrainian data stored on Amazon’s and Microsoft’s European servers is safe from Russian missiles. On the other, this safety stems not from Ukraine’s own defence and deterrence capabilities, but from the implicit shield of NATO. The ‘reterritorialisation’ of the cloud has, in a sense, extended NATO’s protective umbrella to cover Ukraine’s public digital operations.

At the same time, this data resides alongside civilian information from across the world, blurring the line between military and non-military assets. Should such a server farm be targeted, the collateral damage would extend far beyond the battlefield.

This is a vivid illustration of why philosopher of technology Benjamin Bratton once described the cloud as ‘a geopolitical machine’. The cloud is not just a technical system. It is a political architecture that diffuses sovereignty and reconfigures how states perform their most fundamental functions. In Ukraine’s case, Amazon’s and Microsoft’s infrastructure has become an extension of the state’s capacity to govern and defend, making Big Tech not merely a service provider, but a provider of national security.

Wartime decision-making between responsibilisation and contracting 

Nowhere is this corporate-sovereign entanglement more visible than in the actions of Elon Musk and SpaceX. The Starlink satellite network became a lifeline for Ukraine’s military communications early in the war, but it also became a stage for Musk’s own wartime decision-making.

Musk’s choices, whether to provide or restrict access to Starlink in certain areas, were not bound by formal contracts but by his personal sense of moral responsibility. This blurring of corporate and sovereign authority raises uncomfortable questions. What happens when critical national security decisions rest on the conscience, ideology, or temperament of a single CEO?

Governments, in turn, are caught in a balancing act between responsibilisation – the transfer of responsibility from higher authorities to individuals or communities – and contracting; between relying on the voluntary moral commitments of corporate leaders and reasserting control through formal agreements. The Ukrainian case demonstrates that modern warfighting now depends as much on the disposition of private executives as on the strategies of generals.

This dynamic has given Big Tech leaders a new kind of power: the ability to oscillate between being moral agents of global security and shrewd business actors, whichever best serves their interests at any given moment.

Monopolising national security knowledge

Microsoft, meanwhile, has positioned itself as the knowledge backbone of modern digital warfare. Through its cybersecurity operations, Microsoft collects and analyses massive volumes of data on cyber threats targeting Ukraine. In doing so, it strengthens not only Ukraine’s defences but also its own global software and security offerings. The decision to provide cybersecurity and cloud support to Ukraine, at substantial business cost and risk, was clearly motivated by moral considerations, including at the individual level by Microsoft president Brad Smith. However, it was also a decision with reputational and technological advantages that are likely to pay off handsomely in the longer term. 

More troubling still is the geopolitical leverage this creates. As most NATO allied governments rely on Microsoft infrastructure to protect critical IT systems – running everything form health care and schools to militaries and police functions – a hierarchy of dependency emerges. In the event of a wider conflict, Microsoft could face impossible choices about which state to prioritise. The result could be a form of digital alliance politics in which NATO members compete not for military support, but for corporate favour.

Sovereign subscriptions

Taken together, these examples reveal a profound shift in the nature of sovereignty. Many states increasingly operate as cloud-based entities, with their essential data and communications distributed across a global network of privately owned infrastructures. Big Tech, in turn, assumes quasi-sovereign state functions: storing state secrets, enabling command-and-control communications, and defending cyberspace.

This arrangement blurs the line between public and private authority, between moral duty and market logic, between statecraft and platform governance. It also exposes the fragility of a world order where the security of nations depends on the policies or whims of a handful of tech executives.

As wars move further into the digital realm, sovereignty itself risks becoming a subscription service.

This article draws on research recently published in the European Journal of International Relations that can be found here.