The Cloud Has a Geography Now (Project Syndicate)

The cloud has a geography now. The Gulf strikes on hyperscaler data centers made visible that physical disruption is now part of the threat model — and Europe’s compliance-bound architecture is not optimized for rapid cross-border response.

 While global hyperscalers operate with greater flexibility to build cross-region resilience into their systems, national telecoms/sector-specific laws fragment infrastructure across member states, while the GDPR creates legal friction around rerouting data outside the EU — leaving European digital infrastructure with constrained flexibility in either direction when a facility goes dark.

 The core tension isn’t just localization vs. rerouting: it’s legal certainty vs. operational speed. The NIS2 Directive raises the floor on security, but doesn’t resolve that trade-off under stress.

 If physical disruption is now a permanent feature of the threat model, resilience needs to be designed into the regulatory layer — not treated as an afterthought to compliance. Read more