As humanity pushes forward into the digital future, the demand for data storage and processing facilities is placing increased pressure on the financial, technical and environmental resources available on Earth. Largely driven by accelerated AI development, the idea of placing data centres in orbit has come in for serious consideration, with tests being carried out by private enterprises, States and regional blocs.
But with data becoming increasingly strategic for peace, security and defence, there are still important questions to be answered about ownership, control and strategic dependence between States. Data is also increasingly central to areas like health, commerce, finance and defence, which are critical to national security, leading to a surge in interest in issues of technological and data sovereignty.
Although relatively elastic, technological sovereignty is the ability to safeguard national agency in the domain of technology and innovation. This includes the capability to act independently in the global technological system and to resist unfavourable positions in key value chains, which may be controlled by perceived adversaries. Data sovereignty, meanwhile, extends this self-determination to the use and processing of data surrounding these strategic technologies. For States, this means the sovereignty, control and power to protect their fundamental right to their countries’ data.
Several States have sought data sovereignty by enacting data protection laws, including regulations requiring that certain categories of their citizens’ data be stored or processed within their jurisdiction. Placing data centres in orbit would clearly make this harder to enforce, gumming up one key policy lever in the hands of State authorities. This is especially concerning for developing regions, which have not had the chance to properly regulate, control or demand localization of data centres. Having only nascent or emerging space ecosystems, these regions also lack the infrastructure, know-how, and investment to put data centres of their own into orbit.
Unequal distribution, unequal control
The global data centre landscape currently follows a pronounced geographical and economic pattern. At present, 77% of global co-location data centre capacity is located in developed regions and operated by private enterprises whose usership is global. These operators have also extended their investment into cooperating middle-income countries, which host an 18% share of data centre capacity. These countries are perceived as offering political stability, robust connectivity, reliable electricity, mature data-protection regulation and favourable fiscal environments.
When measured against these metrics, developing regions are rarely seen to provide the same advantages, which partially explains the persistent underinvestment in their data infrastructure. Only 6% of capacity is currently hosted in these regions, although promises of future development persist. The African region, for example, accounts for 17% of the world’s population, making it a significant market for digital technology. Africa is also projected to make up an increasing portion of usership across data applications in the future, not least because its youthful population will continue to expand more rapidly than in developed regions. Despite all this, the region hosts less than 1% of global data centre capacity and attracted only 3% of data centre investment in 2024.
The issue of technological and data sovereignty also comes to the fore when archived datasets generated by civilian users are used to improve operational efficiency in military AI applications, including surveillance, autonomous weapon systems, predictive analytics and targeting. Developing countries generate much of this foundational data, but they have little control over the infrastructure that processes it. This results in an involuntary participation and an asymmetric exchange in which these countries inadvertently export unprocessed data as a resource while importing the high-value applications derived from it. These derivatives, moreover, are imported with prices and conditions set by the exporting State.
If the infrastructure enabling this process were to migrate into orbit, this imbalance would only become further institutionalized, at an altitude where significant gaps persist in the governance of such systems in orbit. In effect, this means that those owning and controlling data-derived applications can hold a less capable actor at risk, even if these actors contributed to the fundamental development of these applications.
Data sovereignty and Earth observation
The early applications of data infrastructure in orbit are leaning towards Earth observation because the data itself is generated in orbit, making the addition of compute to the satellites involved an obvious choice. There is also a clear commercial logic to circumventing the transmission bottleneck to ground stations by reducing latency, eliminating delays and automating processing through sophisticated on-orbit AI applications.
Commercial and government providers of satellite data have actively sought to partner with and serve developing regions. When developing countries are recorded in satellite imagery, the satellites and the on-orbit processing technology are owned and controlled by their developed counterparts, whose capacity to make decisions about and for the former is enhanced.
Developing countries access these platforms through aid-conditioned agreements and rarely through commercial partnerships. They may receive access to an analytical product, but they gain limited access to the raw data, processing algorithms or AI-model parameters and have little influence in the creation and application of derived products. This is particularly important in defence-relevant applications, where access to Earth observation-derived intelligence can constitute a meaningful capability differentiator. This impacts technological sovereignty and weakens agency in key sectors like border surveillance, armed conflict, climate security, food security and critical minerals.
In the absence of pragmatic reciprocity, data sovereignty is also further compromised by the risks of soft-power bargaining. More advanced States can provide sophisticated capabilities as defence cooperation under allyship while simultaneously exercising asymmetric leverage in wider geopolitical and trade agreements. The dependency structure of current international Earth observation partnerships, for example, already hints at how power could play out in the orbital data-centre governance of the future. It is imperative that such imbalances be addressed, because their effects on collective security and stability are all too real.
Towards a secure, sovereign and equitable future
Emerging space actors have an early opportunity to prioritize research that improves domestic analytical capacity, bolsters their interests, advances credible positions in multilateral forums and enables properly informed negotiation on terrestrial and orbital data governance. Some tech-savvy emerging States have already begun to contribute to a more pluralistic form of terrestrial data governance, an approach which could also be adapted to multilateral space security processes. Targeted investment in research at the nexus of space security, data governance and strategic emerging technology could further strengthen these efforts.
Regional initiatives like the African Union’s space policy, space strategy and data policy framework, together with the Africa Declaration on Artificial Intelligence, can also serve as vehicles for coordinated agenda-setting, enabling smaller States to pool technocratic capacity and present unified positions.
There remains, however, a need to close governance gaps here by addressing:
- Benefit-sharing
- Access rights to on-orbit data processing algorithms
- Obligations on operators, including third States
- Dispute resolution mechanisms available to States lacking independent capability
The Outer Space Treaty provides a normative and legal foundation for equitable governance of orbital data infrastructure, particularly through its principle that the exploration and use of outer space should benefit all peoples, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development. Lessons can also be drawn from the norms of responsible State behaviour on information and communication technology, which acknowledge capacity disparities between States while recognizing the continuously evolving technological landscape. These principles can be operationalized to develop regulations that ensure ethical, accountable, equitable and accessible use of orbital data.
Finally, as geostrategic globalization begins to span Earth and space, developing regions should seek fair partnership models and avoid becoming arenas of competition between world powers. Strategic technological partnerships should aim to reduce long-term dependence and eventually allow capability transfer and co-development arrangements that go beyond access. These could even limit use of derived products in security-sensitive sectors unless there is explicit cooperation, co-ownership of hardware and software, sharing of high-value data, and explainability and auditability of responsible AI-powered processes in space data.
Preventing terrestrial inequalities from reaching orbit
Orbital data infrastructure could soon become a reality, and its sovereignty and governance implications require immediate attention. For developed States with greater access to technology and space capabilities, these new ambitions represent a familiar case of technological advantage being extended across domains. For developing States with fewer capabilities, this could foreclose governance options that have yet even to be fully exercised here on Earth. The security considerations in play call for the kinds of urgent research, inclusive dialogue and coordinated multilateral engagement that will help prevent humanity’s digital future in space from reproducing the inequalities we find here on Earth today.
