Until now, national infrastructure was something centrally managed and deployed across an entire country. Power plants, communication networks, water systems, roads, and data centers—all followed a model of “build in one place, use everywhere.” It was the nation that built, protected, and supplied these systems.
But that structure is slowly starting to change.
As portions of information infrastructure and computational resources come to be operated by specific tech giants, the infrastructure that once sat beneath the authority of the state is beginning to form a structure parallel to it. And what’s coming next is a shift away from centralization—toward a physical and logical model of “distribution.”
Distribution doesn’t simply mean breaking things into smaller parts. It means separating locations, ownership, control rights, power sources, and networks. It means running each independently, while allowing them to function together as a single system. That, to me, is the core of what “distributed national infrastructure” means.
This kind of structure is often discussed in terms of redundancy in disasters or risk dispersion in geopolitics. But more importantly, I believe it becomes critical when we begin asking, “Under whose sovereignty does this infrastructure operate?”
Entities not belonging to any central authority, but possessing social functions equal to or greater than national infrastructure. Cloud services, blockchain networks, local compute clusters, off-grid energy systems—when combined, these create a new kind of infrastructure that transcends borders and legal systems.
Whether this becomes something that replaces the nation-state, or something that complements it, remains to be seen. But what’s clear is that infrastructure is no longer something exclusive to states.
Perhaps we are entering an era where infrastructure is not something built by the state, but something into which the state must now merge—beyond the constraints of geography and the linear flow of time.