Data: The New Geopolitical Weapon
The cable lies at the bottom of the sea. It is thinner than a garden hose and carries, at any given moment, approximately 95% of all international internet traffic. There are hundreds of these cables, knitting together continents, and they are not — despite what their name suggests — a neutral commons. They are infrastructure. And infrastructure, in the geopolitics of the 21st century, is power.
When state actors map the world’s data infrastructure, they do not see an open network. They see chokepoints, vulnerabilities, and leverage. The submarine cable networks that once seemed like the arteries of a free and borderless internet are now recognized, in strategic capitals from Washington to Beijing to Brussels, as the critical terrain of a new kind of conflict — one that is already underway, and that most of us cannot see.
The Sovereignty Gambit
The concept of “data sovereignty” — the principle that data generated within a nation’s borders should be subject to that nation’s jurisdiction — has moved from academic theory to geopolitical battleground in less than a decade.
China’s data localization requirements, formalized through the Data Security Law and the Personal Information Protection Law, mandate that significant categories of data generated in China remain on Chinese servers, subject to Chinese law. This is not only a privacy framework. It is an assertion of territorial control over a new kind of resource — one that, unlike oil or rare earth metals, can be copied, analyzed, and weaponized instantaneously.
The EU’s GDPR, often framed as a privacy measure, functions simultaneously as a data sovereignty instrument — limiting the extraction of European-generated data by non-European (predominantly American) platforms. The geopolitical implications are significant: Brussels has asserted, in effect, that European data is a European resource.
The Infrastructure Race
Beneath the regulatory surface, a physical competition is playing out. The United States, through its “Clean Network” initiative and successor programs, has sought to exclude Chinese telecommunications infrastructure — particularly Huawei equipment — from allied nations’ networks. The argument is security: hardware and software built by companies subject to Chinese law may serve as vectors for state surveillance or sabotage.
China has responded by accelerating the development of its own undersea cable routes, seeking to reduce dependence on infrastructure in which Western intelligence agencies have documented interception capabilities. The result is a quiet bifurcation of global internet infrastructure along geopolitical lines — what some analysts call a “splinternet,” though the term undersells the gravity of what is occurring.
The Asymmetry of Access
The most consequential and least-discussed dimension of the data geopolitics is the asymmetry of access. Western intelligence agencies, particularly those in the Five Eyes alliance, have documented (and in some cases been caught exploiting) access to data flows transiting infrastructure in their jurisdictions. The Snowden revelations of 2013 made this concrete for public audiences; the infrastructure has not materially changed.
This creates a structural advantage for states whose data sovereignty measures are backed by genuine technical and geographic control — and a vulnerability for states whose data flows through infrastructure they do not control. For smaller nations, the choice of which infrastructure to build and which companies to partner with is, increasingly, a choice about which major power’s surveillance apparatus they are most comfortable operating within.
The Coming Framework
The question that international institutions have failed to resolve is whether data — like the high seas, like airspace, like electromagnetic spectrum — will eventually be governed by a multilateral framework that constrains the behavior of powerful states, or whether it will remain a domain of unconstrained geopolitical competition.
Current trends suggest the latter. The institutional architecture required for genuine data governance — enforcement mechanisms, shared technical standards, agreed principles of non-interference — does not exist and shows no signs of emerging from a world already fractured by strategic competition.
In the absence of governance, the rules are written by infrastructure owners. And infrastructure ownership is determined by power. The data war has no armistice on the horizon.
Yuki Tanaka is Datum’s geopolitics correspondent, covering the intersection of technology and international relations.