Infrastructural entanglement and cloud hyperscalers in contemporary warfare: Insights from Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan

The new front lines of warfare are being built on private clouds. This article argues that state dependence on cloud hyperscalers is reshaping the foundations of military-industrial power. Drawing on theories of platform capitalism and asymmetrical interdependence, it develops the concept of infrastructural entanglement to capture how sovereign military and civilian operations have become embedded within privately governed digital systems. The argument unfolds through three wartime contexts: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (2022), the Israel–Hamas conflict (2023), and a potential cross-Strait crisis involving Taiwan. Ukraine’s rapid cloud migration, Israel’s use of hyperscaler analytics on the battlefield, and Taiwan’s anticipatory offshore data relocation each reveal how hyperscalers now mediate command, coordination, and resilience. Their infrastructures not only enable combat effectiveness but also extend commercial governance into the core of defense, redefining autonomy and sovereignty in ways that make control over war increasingly dependent on infrastructures the state does not own.