The Great Bandwidth Divide: How the Global South Is Paying for the West’s Cloud Addiction

By Shohei Kobayashi Apr. 3, 2025

The cloud was supposed to dissolve borders. Instead, it has redrawn them in fiber optics. Behind every Netflix stream, ChatGPT query, or Google Drive upload lies a vast and unequal infrastructure of undersea cables, data centers, and energy-hungry cooling towers—most of which remain physically rooted in the Global South but economically owned by the North.

According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU Global Connectivity Atlas, 2025), 74 percent of new data cable landings since 2018 have been built in developing regions, yet over 80 percent of revenue from cross-border data flows accrues to corporations headquartered in the United States and Europe. In effect, the “cloud” is not an ethereal space—it is a planetary extraction grid.

Digital Colonialism 2.0

The logic mirrors 19th-century colonial economics: extract raw resources—in this case, bandwidth and land—and export the value. Cloud providers lease cheap electricity and real estate from developing nations while retaining ownership of the data infrastructure.

A single Amazon Web Services (AWS) hyperscale facility in Cape Town consumes 50 megawatts of power, enough to supply 150,000 South African homes (Energy Policy Journal, 2025). Yet its profits are repatriated to Seattle. Similar trends appear in Indonesia, Kenya, and Chile, where governments grant tax exemptions to attract data investment but see minimal fiscal return.

The World Bank Digital Infrastructure Report (2025) notes that only 4 percent of global cloud profits remain in hosting countries, despite their bearing the environmental and grid burden.

The 21st century’s mines are digital, and the new mineral is computation.

The Geography of the Cloud

The geography of cloud infrastructure reveals a hierarchy of control. The Oxford Internet Institute Data Topology Map (2024) identifies three “data empires”:

1. The U.S. Cloud Bloc – Dominated by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

2. The Chinese Data Sphere – Led by Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei Cloud.

3. The Peripheral Hosts – Regions providing land, labor, and electricity without sovereignty over stored data.

Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America increasingly fall into the third category. Hyperscale construction is booming: Lagos saw a 380 percent increase in server capacity between 2020 and 2025, yet less than 5 percent of its population can afford commercial cloud services (GSMA Connectivity Report, 2025).

The infrastructure exists—but the ownership doesn’t.

The Carbon Shadow of the Cloud

Cloud computing is not immaterial; it is carbon incarnate. Data centers account for 3.9 percent of global electricity use and 2.4 percent of total carbon emissions (International Energy Agency [IEA] Data Systems Outlook, 2025). Much of this burden falls on regions least equipped to decarbonize.

Kenya’s geothermal fields, once hailed as renewable success stories, now power massive European cloud nodes. Vietnam’s coal-heavy grid supplies data facilities for Chinese tech giants. In both cases, environmental responsibility is outsourced to developing nations—while emissions count toward their national inventories, not the corporations that caused them.

The result: “green” digital transformation for the North, brown energy dependency for the South.

The Bandwidth Tax

The inequality is not just ecological—it’s economic. Undersea cables like the 2Africa system, built by Meta and partners, connect 33 countries but are privately owned consortia. Usage fees and traffic prioritization allow corporations to charge developing ISPs premium rates for bandwidth generated within their own borders.

The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD Digital Trade Review, 2025) estimates that low-income nations pay up to 400 percent more per gigabit of international data transfer than high-income ones. The same digital bytes flow south to north more profitably than north to south—mirroring historical trade asymmetries.

Even the World Wide Web now has a balance of payments problem.

Data Sovereignty and the Illusion of Inclusion

To counter dependency, many countries have introduced data localization laws, requiring information to be stored domestically. But this often backfires. Lacking native cloud infrastructure, governments end up paying foreign firms to build “sovereign” servers operated under lease.

Indonesia’s 2024 Digital Sovereignty Act mandated local data hosting for public services—yet 92 percent of servers were subcontracted to foreign-owned providers (Jakarta Policy Forum Brief, 2025). The result: sovereignty in law, dependence in practice.

Similarly, Nigeria’s National Data Protection Bureau estimated that keeping government data local increased operating costs by 48 percent, as domestic providers had to rent foreign software licenses.

Data sovereignty, without technological sovereignty, becomes a paradox.

The Hidden Labor Behind the Cloud

The cloud’s physical backbone relies on invisible human labor: data labelers, content moderators, and call center workers concentrated in Manila, Nairobi, and Dhaka. The Fairwork Foundation Digital Labor Index (2025) estimates that over 8 million people in developing nations perform “ghost work” for global AI systems, earning an average of US$2.20 per hour—a fraction of the value their labor creates.

These workers train the same algorithms that later replace them. Their data becomes the intelligence of machines they will never own.

In short, the cloud’s scalability is built on global asymmetry—cheap human cognition feeding expensive artificial ones.

Policy Futures: Building a Fairer Cloud

Experts propose three urgent reforms to correct the bandwidth divide:

1. Digital Equity Tariffs – Implement international taxation on cross-border data flows, with revenue reinvested into broadband and green infrastructure in hosting nations.

2. Open Cloud Standards – Encourage interoperability and shared governance to prevent monopolization by private hyperscalers.

3. Labor Recognition Frameworks – Extend international labor protections and minimum wage guarantees to digital gig workers under ILO supervision.

The OECD Inclusive Connectivity Proposal (2025) projects that adopting these measures could redistribute US$180 billion annually from cloud monopolies to infrastructure-deprived regions by 2030.

The Future: Clouds with Borders

The myth of the cloud was that it floated above politics. The truth is that it sits squarely inside it—anchored to land, powered by inequality, and governed by contracts.

As the West uploads its prosperity, the Global South supplies its bandwidth, energy, and human labor. The digital revolution, like every revolution before it, risks repeating the geography of empire—unless ownership of the sky itself is rewritten.

Works Cited

“Global Connectivity Atlas.” International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 2025.

 “Energy Policy Journal.” University of Cape Town Press, 2025.

 “Digital Infrastructure Report.” World Bank Group, 2025.

 “Data Topology Map.” Oxford Internet Institute, 2024.

 “Connectivity Report.” GSM Association (GSMA), 2025.

 “Data Systems Outlook.” International Energy Agency (IEA), 2025.

 “Digital Trade Review.” United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 2025.

 “Policy Forum Brief.” Jakarta Institute for Policy Studies, 2025.

 “Digital Labor Index.” Fairwork Foundation, 2025.

 “Inclusive Connectivity Proposal.” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2025.