While global superpowers continue to negotiate trade wars over technology, the rest of the world has quietly entered a new state of systemic vulnerability: algorithmic neo-colonialism. On the whole, the countries of the Global South are not sovereign participants in this new digital trade war. Rather, they have become a source of critical raw materials for the biggest technology companies of today, and many are fighting for digital sovereignty. This new colonization is not carried out by ships filled with troops sailing from Europe to plunder tin and timber, but by the internet superpowers and large tech firms of the Global North — the platforms, search engines, and cloud providers — who come to extract and carry off a new type of raw material: data. This extraction harvests granular profiles on individual health, economic, and political behavior and routes the compiled wealth back to the Global North.
This exploitation is more insidious than simply mining a metal or other precious mineral. Foreign-owned hyperscale data centers support and run much of the digital infrastructure of the Global South, and through their presence, lock nations into financial dependency and hard-code inequality. Examples are numerous. Standard Bank of Africa, one of the largest banks on the African continent, runs on AWS, Amazon Web Services. Similarly, Eka Care, a widely used health app in India with over 110 million users that stores personal data, also runs on AWS. The Kenyan Ministry of Health, meanwhile, has partnered with Microsoft to create an AI for its health services.
When a nation’s data storage systems run on foreign technology, it becomes subject to foreign legal jurisdictions, which may act to limit the host nation’s regulatory control over the data acquired within that country. Laws like the US CLOUD Act allow the United States government to compel American companies to hand over requested data regardless of where the data is stored or where it is generated. In effect, this dual sovereignty means that the nation from which the data was gathered does not truly control its national digital assets, as local data protection laws are effectively rendered meaningless. The inability of a country to independently set its own digital policy and respond as it deems appropriate to a crisis amounts to a silent surrender of regulatory and political control. The US government and its allies have already shown that they are not afraid to use this leverage to their advantage.
The problem of algorithmic neo-colonialism extends beyond the retention of data. Algorithms developed in the Global North and then applied to the Global South without appropriate modifications can also result in unintended negative consequences. For example, in Southeast Asia and Africa, micro-lending apps often use opaque, proprietary algorithms to determine creditworthiness. These models, trained on foreign financial norms and lacking an understanding of local budgeting behaviors, frequently misclassify or penalize the working poor and informally employed. This can lead to the denial of credit and result in perpetuating financial exclusion. The ultimate power does not reside with the local nation state but with the remote, opaque code applying Global North standards and norms.
“This extraction harvests granular profiles on individual health, economic, and political behavior and routes the compiled wealth back to the Global North.”
By depending on proprietary foreign technology developed in the Global North, the Global South often incurs additional, less obvious economic, social, and political costs. Such dependency creates vendor lock-in, stifling the development of indigenous digital ecosystems and draining both financial and intellectual capital towards large international technology companies.
This digital leverage is a strategic expansion of classic foreign investment strategies, whether state-driven like China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) or commercially driven by Global North tech giants. Operating in a manner not unlike the debt-trap diplomacy over physical assets of China’s BRI, the Digital Silk Road exports proprietary 5G and cloud services, granting a deeper, near-permanent form of control over a nation’s entire digital nervous system. For instance, in Zimbabwe, the agreement with the Chinese firm Cloudwalk to implement mass surveillance technology included surrendering the biometric data of millions of Zimbabwean citizens to China. This allows the foreign power to exert influence, making the host nation structurally dependent on its continued cooperation for day-to-day governance.
Like the 20th century’s independence movement, which focused on freeing a nation’s land from the vestiges of foreign colonial control, in the 21st century, countries hoping to hang onto their sovereignty will have to take steps to reclaim control over their data.
Fortunately, nations in the Global South are recognizing that true data sovereignty cannot be achieved by attempting to replicate the centralized, proprietary Big Tech models of the Global North. Some countries are increasing their investments in Digital Public Infrastructure, which aims to govern foundational digital information — such as identity, payments, and data exchange. Ethiopia’s Fayda ID is an example. This state-led initiative provides 90 million residents with a unique digital identity, ensuring the nation’s foundational identification data remains under national regulatory control, rather than subject to foreign jurisdictions. By creating such sovereign digital assets, countries are effectively establishing a public utility that drastically reduces reliance on costlier private and foreign intermediaries.
Still, these steps, important as they are, are not enough — especially as these nations often lack the funding and technical capacity necessary for immediate, widespread adoption.
The question remains whether incremental reforms by individual Global South countries will be enough when the struggle has shifted from borders to bandwidth and from who governs territory to who governs data. It is a decisive moment: the divide between those who own data and those who merely hand it over is deepening. For the Global South, allowing data to remain stored offshore will leave technologists dependent on the foreign infrastructure and software into which the Global North’s external priorities and biases are baked. The last century’s decolonization struggles sought to reclaim land and labor. The next chapter of global independence, though, will be written not through territory but through a long fight to reclaim both data and code.
