Imran Khalid
07 July 2025•Update: 09 July 2025
The author is a geostrategic analyst and freelance columnist on international affairs.
ISTANBUL
In the dying days of the telegraph, empires fought over copper cables in the same way navies once clashed over spice routes. In 2025, the prize is less tangible but no less strategic: the packet-switched arteries that carry our data, our dreams and, crucially, our leverage. Silicon Valley’s giants still own most of those arteries - and the rules that govern them. Unless the BRICS bloc (now swelled to 10 members, with several "partner countries" waiting in the wings) drafts its own map for a Digital Silk Road, it risks discovering that the future has been subcontracted to California on a renewable license.
Together with their newer companions, BRICS+ nations account for roughly 40% [1] of the world’s internet users – nearly 2 billion people staring at screens built on someone else’s operating system. Three American cloud giants still command 63% of global enterprise cloud spending. Even US regulators have begun sounding the alarm over this dominance, with a formal investigation [2] launched into certain cloud practices—echoing similar concerns raised in the UK over their designation as holding "strategic market status."
If US antitrust authorities are worried, imagine how the Global South must feel. Data sovereignty is fast becoming the litmus test of political sovereignty. Beijing’s original Digital Silk Road (DSR), the electronic branch of the Belt & Road Initiative, set out to wire the world with Chinese 5G towers, under-sea cables and smart-city sensors. It spooked Washington so much that think tanks now publish hand-wringing reports [3] titled "Countering the Digital Silk Road." Yet the DSR was largely unilateral: China financing, China building, China owning. A BRICS-branded upgrade would spread both the risks and the rewards, bundling Chinese hardware efficiencies with Indian software scale, Russian cybersecurity chops, Brazilian AI sandboxes and South African fintech agility.
The logic is economic as well as strategic. BRICS nations already generate about 30 percent of global ICT goods [4] and 11% of digitally deliverable service. What they lack is a common backbone to keep that value inside the bloc. A shared cloud federation – mirroring Europe’s stalled "GAIA-X" but turbo-charged by BRICS demographics – could allow data to stay in Johannesburg when a South African hospital orders Indian tele-medicine, or in Sao Paulo when a Brazilian agri-startup crunches satellite images from Shenzhen.
Türkiye could be a bridge for a digital future
Enter Ankara. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees in BRICS a platform that neither requires abandoning the West nor apologizing for courting the East. With its rapidly expanding e-commerce landscape, and the early-stage development of its state-supported “TRCloud” initiative, Türkiye is well-positioned to serve as a pilot ground for BRICS digital protocols. Straddling the edge of Europe’s intricate regulatory framework, it is attuned to concerns like GDPR, yet remains eager for investment flows from the Global South—despite reservations from Silicon Valley. Integrating Türkiye into a broader Digital Silk Road would lend the initiative a Mediterranean character—an important strategic layer if the goal includes drawing in bandwidth from the Middle East or tapping fiber optic routes across North Africa.
Obstacles on the road: Governance, trust and cost
Of course, top-down digital sovereignty fantasies die hard in BRICS capitals. The bloc once floated an under-sea "BRICS Cable" to route traffic away from NSA eyes; it sank in 2015 under its own cost estimates. Coordinating spectrum policy across 10 vastly different telecom authorities is harder than herding alpacas. And without airtight governance rules, a BRICS cloud risks looking like a Beijing cloud with extra regional servers. But time doesn't stop. April’s BRICS meeting in Brasília on joint cybersecurity drills [5] signaled a willingness to share not just hand-shakes but source-code. The Economic Partnership Strategy 2025 commits the bloc [6] to "enhancing transport and digital infrastructure." Even the long-skeptical New Delhi has tabled a "sovereign AI commons" pilot that would let member states co-train large language models on neutral cloud ground.
Meanwhile, Big Tech is busy pitching "sovereign cloud" packages that amount to the same old databases with a different colored dashboard. The moment exclusive hyperscale contracts are secured in places like Sao Paulo or St. Petersburg by dominant foreign providers, the window for creating a truly multipolar internet narrows. Washington is acutely aware of this dynamic. That’s why it has been discreetly pressuring Brazil to steer clear of Chinese 5G infrastructure, while more openly warning BRICS financial platforms of potential secondary sanctions should they attempt to process transactions in yuan.
A new digital silk road
The Digital Silk Road is less a lofty ideal and more a necessary bypass – an alternative route to avoid the tightening choke points of global digital infrastructure. It must include interoperable privacy regimes (so that Russian fears of US backdoors do not morph into Indian fears of Chinese ones), pooled digital-currency rails via the BRICS New Development Bank, and a common position at the World Trade Organization whenever data-flow clauses pop up in minilateral deals. Above all, it requires political imagination – a rare commodity, but not an extinct one.
What might a success look like? Picture a BRICS+ app store where a farmer downloads a South African drought-forecasting algorithm hosted on Brazilian servers and paid for through a New Delhi-cleared e-rupee. No Silicon Valley middleman skimming 30%; no Washington sanction switch; no Brussels lecture on "digital dependencies." Just south-to-south commerce running on cables the South co-owns. Critics are quick to point to internal divisions within the bloc – geopolitical tensions between China and India, or the sanction-laden baggage Russia brings to the table. Yet the same critics forget that the original Silk Road was never a chorus of harmony; it was a relay race of merchants who trusted the route more than they trusted one another. Trust the road, and markets follow.
BRICS has already shown it can redraw financial cartography with its New Development Bank and its de-dollarized trade pilots. It now faces a starker, faster-moving frontier: a digital realm where whoever writes the code writes the commandments. If the bloc waits for Silicon Valley to build its Digital Silk Road, it will wake up one morning to find the toll booths already installed and the terms of service non-negotiable. Türkiye’s half-open door is an invitation to move, not muse. The cables need laying, the standards drafting, the cloud nodes switching on - before another FTC investigation turns into yet another wave of Silicon Valley consolidation. Empires of old fought for spice; empires of now fight for space - server space, spectrum bandwidth, and storage capacity etched into silicon. The Digital Silk Road is simply the trade route of this century.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/28/uk-competition-regulator-doug-gurr-cma
[3] https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/countering-the-digital-silk-road-brazil
[4] https://www.nextias.com/ca/current-affairs/24-05-2025/virtual-capacity-building-digital-transformation-brics
[5] https://brics.br/en/news/brics-strengthens-cooperation-on-cybersecurity
[6] https://bricstoday.com/brics-economic-partnership-strategy-2025/
*Opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Anadolu's editorial policy.
