Compute as Critical Infrastructure: A Governance Framework for Protecting and Regulating the Physical Layer of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The physical layer of artificial intelligence, comprising data centres, submarine and terrestrial fibre, grid interconnections, and the telecommunications networks that bind them, has become materially and strategically critical, yet it sits inside a governance gap. Security law treats parts of it as critical infrastructure to be protected, artificial intelligence law treats a slice of it as compute to be regulated, and energy law treats another slice as load to be permitted, but no jurisdiction governs the physical layer as a coherent object. This article develops a governance framework that closes the gap. It identifies three governance framings now competing over the same infrastructure, namely national-security protection, compute regulation, and energy and environmental permitting, and argues that each is partial on its own. Drawing on the drone strikes against Amazon Web Services facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in March 2026, the Baltic and Taiwan submarine-cable disruptions of 2024 and 2025, and the emerging regulation of data-centre electrical load, the article proposes a layered designation, protection, and regulation framework built on four criteria for a defensible designation of compute as critical infrastructure: essentiality, cascading interdependence, contestation, and governability. It uses Nigeria's Designation and Protection of Critical National Information Infrastructure Order 2024 as a worked instance of a developing-market state that has already designated telecommunications and data-centre assets as critical national infrastructure under the Office of the National Security Adviser, and reads that instrument against practice in the United States and the European Union. The analysis relies solely on publicly available information. The contribution is a portable governance architecture that treats the physical layer as a single regulated object while guarding against the over-securitisation of civilian infrastructure.

Keywords: critical infrastructure, ai governance, data centres, compute, telecommunications, national security

DOI: 10.7176/JETP/16-1-04

Publication date: September 28^th 2026