Vili Lehdonvirta is Professor of Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and Professor of Technology Policy at the Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Finland. He leads the Digital Economic Security Lab (DIESL). He has been awarded three European Research Council grants for studies on the international political economy of digital technologies. His books on Cloud Empires and Virtual Economies are published by MIT Press and translated to Chinese, Japanese, and Italian. He is a frequent keynote speaker and has advised the European Commission, the World Bank, the OECD, national governments, firms, and startups on digital policy, infrastructure, and strategy.
Lehdonvirta’s current research focuses on the geopolitics and geoeconomics of digital infrastructures. His GEOCLOUD research project maps the evolution of the world’s cloud computing infrastructure, who owns it, how much societies depend on it, and how it can be shaped by policy and corporate strategy. His Political Geography of AI Infrastructure research project maps the world’s AI compute, a key bottleneck in AI system development and deployment. Lehdonvirta’s group uses both conventional social science research methods as well as novel computational approaches to collect data and model policy impacts.
