🔥The 9th Round of Easy Loan, Earn $40 Reward is in progress❗️ ⏰ Promotion Period: January 15th - Feburary 15th, 2025 👉 Register now and check more details at gate.io/campaigns/358

Tickets are now sold out to attend this event in person! We're looking forward to seeing many of you in Oxford in a couple of weeks. For those of you who would like to attend online/remotely, please register using the following form: forms.office.com/pages/response…

El Salvador notched another record: first country to rescind Bitcoin as legal tender

€20 billion for "AI gigafactories" which will each have "around 100 000 last-generation AI chips". Nice big deal for Nvidia or AMD (...or Huawei's new Ascend?)

"Over the past decade there has been a shift in which these cables are increasingly laid by large technology companies," Vili Lehdonvirta Oxford Internet Institute OxfordSocialSciences Jesus College Oxford told Liv McMahon BBC News Technology BBC News (UK).

New publication: "Weaponized interdependence in a bipolar world: How economic forces and security interests shape the global reach of U.S. and Chinese cloud data centres" forthcoming in Review of International Political Economy with Bóxī Wú 吴泊曦 Zoe Hawkins osf.io/preprints/soca…

I'll be presenting this work at the International Studies Association conference in Chicago in a session chaired by Abraham Newman this coming Monday at 8.15am, titled "Big Tech Companies as Governors and Objects of Governance in Global Politics" #ISA2025

Happening in one hour! #ISA2025 ISA

Meta's Project Waterworth: Building the world's longest submarine cable. But what does it mean?Vili Lehdonvirta & Anniki Mikelsaar explore the implications. Key takeaways: Big Tech's growing infrastructure control, US economic power, and resilient new routes. oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/wh…

What does Meta's undersea cable plan mean for geopolitics? New expert commentary from OII Prof Vili Lehdonvirta and DPhil student Anniki Mikelsaar dives into the implications for data control & global connectivity: ox.ac.uk/news/2025-03-1…

Weaponised interdependence in a bipolar world: how economic forces and security interests shape the global reach of US and Chinese cloud data centres, by Vili Lehdonvirta, Bóxī Wú 吴泊曦 & Zoe Hawkins tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

US-China cloud competition, sovereign clouds, environmental impacts, and local opposition to data centres in our Digital Economic Security zoom seminar this term. Open to researchers and students from any university or research institution: diesl.eu/digital-econom…

Trending in #IR: ooir.org/index.php?fiel… 1) Decarbonising nat'l growth models (@ripejournal) 2) Activism of Thai Diasporas 3) Transformation of int'l studies before/during war (@risjnl) 4) Macrofinance & green transformation 5) Global reach of US & Chinese cloud data centres

1/ Enslaved people are being sold to the Russian army for up to 100,000 rubles ($1,240) each, according to anti-slavery campaigners. The issue highlights Russia's hidden but chronic problem with modern slavery, which Putin's government has failed to tackle. ⬇️

"The captain of a Hong Kong-flagged container ship has been remanded in custody on suspicion of severing a critical Baltic Sea gas pipeline running between Estonia and Finland two years ago."

“Oil-producing countries have had an oversized influence on international affairs; in an A.I.-powered near future, compute producers could have something similar since they control access to a critical resource,” Vili Lehdonvirta Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford told Paul Mozur 孟建國 Adam Satariano The New York Times