Report by the Tony Blair Institute: “Modern states increasingly depend on digital infrastructure that is both critical and physically vulnerable. Identity systems, registries, payments, legal records, administrative platforms and public-service channels now form part of the state’s operational core. When these systems fail, the issue is not only service disruption, but also the continuity and credibility of government itself.
War, cyber-attacks, sabotage, terrorism and natural disasters can all affect the systems on which governments, economies and public services rely. Artificial intelligence intensifies this challenge. Governments will increasingly depend on concentrated, capital-intensive infrastructure – cloud, compute, energy, connectivity, secure data environments – that many states cannot fully build, finance or control domestically. As a result, the question is no longer whether states will depend on infrastructure beyond their borders, but how that dependence can be governed.
One concept attracting growing attention as a potential solution to these challenges is the digital embassy – a legally, technically and politically governed arrangement that allows states to preserve, restore or operate critical digital functions through trusted infrastructure beyond their territory. Building on the earlier data-embassy model, which focused on legally protected cross-border storage and recovery of critical state data and systems, digital embassies go even further. They can provide live-system continuity, service continuity and, in some cases, trusted access to cloud, compute or AI infrastructure. At their most advanced, digital embassies are designed to preserve the operational capacity of the state – including identification, authentication, access to records, legal administrative processes and communication with citizens – even when domestic infrastructure or normal administration is disrupted.
This paper argues that digital embassies should be understood as strategic instruments for resilience, security, sovereignty and capability. For guest states (those seeking to externalise elements of their sovereign digital infrastructure), they can reduce single points of failure, preserve state continuity and provide access to strategic infrastructure. For host states (those aiming to host such systems for other countries), they can attract investment, strengthen the economy, aggregate demand for cloud and compute, deepen strategic partnerships, and position countries within the emerging global digital and AI infrastructure ecosystem. But hosting also creates political, legal and security exposure, and therefore requires credible safeguards and institutional capacity…(More)”.
