Digital Sovereignty is a research initiative examining when and how societies should govern their dependence on foreign digital infrastructure, combining a criticality-adjusted analytical framework, an organized-interdependence theory of sovereignty, and direct engagement in Swedish public debate.
2026
Digital Sovereignty brings together several applications for a Criticality-Adjusted Digital Sovereignty (CADS) research environment and ongoing research activities that test what digital sovereignty means in practice for Swedish and European infrastructure, industry, and welfare.
Digital sovereignty, critical infrastructure, cloud dependency, data governance, EU digital autonomy, governance arrangements, criticality assessment
Sweden and the EU are increasingly dependent on non-European hyperscale cloud and AI infrastructure, but have no shared framework for judging when that dependence crosses a threshold of strategic criticality, or who has the authority to decide. The proposed sale of a 214-hectare municipally owned industrial site in Timrå to Google, to host a data center drawing power on the scale of a major nuclear reactor, is a concrete case in point: it is a local planning decision with national-strategic consequences for electricity capacity, industrial competitiveness, and total defence, decided without a state-level review of whether the value generated is proportionate to the strategic asset given up. Existing digital sovereignty debates tend toward blanket calls for autonomy or unqualified acceptance of dependence, offering little guidance on which dependencies matter, in which domains, and under what conditions they become acceptable.
The initiative develops a criticality-adjusted approach to digital sovereignty: rather than treating sovereignty as an all-or-nothing property, it maps a governance matrix that differentiates degrees and domains of criticality, so that dependence can be assessed against what is actually at stake in a given case. In parallel, the theoretical work reframes digital sovereignty itself as a governance arrangement of organized interdependence among states, firms, and other actors, evaluated by the conditions under which it functions well or poorly. The initiative combines this academic work with direct contributions to Swedish public debate, using live cases to make the framework concrete for policymakers and the public.
A Criticality-Adjusted Digital Sovereignty (CADS) research environment application has been submitted to the Swedish Research Council (VR), including a governance matrix for assessing digital sovereignty by domain and degree of criticality. A theoretical paper developing digital sovereignty as organized interdependence is in preparation for Academy of Management Annals. The initiative's analysis of the Google-Timrå data center deal was published as a DN Debatt op-ed in July 2026.
The DN Debatt piece placed the Google-Timrå case, and the broader question of state-level review for strategically significant power allocation, into the national conversation on digital sovereignty. In addition to this spark, there is a substantial pipeline of ongoing studies and publications.
Sundsvall municipality+
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