Global Digital Technology Networks: Charting the Intersections of Finance and Big Tech

The past few years have seen the growing control by a handful of large American and Chinese
technology companies such as Alibaba, Amazon, Google, etc. over many aspects of life. Financial
services, which are increasingly delivered in an online/digital way, are no exception. While
geographers have studied how banks are deploying financial technologies such as Artificial
Intelligence and Big Data, the growing dependence of banks on the technological infrastructure of Big
Tech firms has received little attention. Closing this research gap, the project maps the growing
intersections of finance and Big Tech in the area of cloud computing. Cloud computing implies
storing, managing, and analyzing financial data not on local servers but over a network connecting to
data centres owned by Big Tech firms. The project develops the concept of Global Digital Technology
Networks as a distinct space that intersects with more established Global Financial Networks. The
project studies ‘cloud interfacing’ between banks and Big Tech in three core regions of the world:
China, the European Union, and the United States. Through a mixed method design it analyses cloud
regulation, urban and regional cloud networks, and cloud strategies at the level of individual banks.
Taken together, insights will allow to retheorize the nuanced power relations between finance and
tech and allow to assess to what extent financial centres remain the dominant centres of command
and control under platform finance.