The Rulers: Corporate Power in the Age of AI and the Cloud

Speaker: Cecilia Rikap, University College London 

How did we arrive at a world in which a handful of megacorporations from the United States -and to a lesser extent, from China- control the production and use of the technologies that define contemporary capitalism? Among giants, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft are the new core of global capitalism. Resulting relations of dependency cannot be described through the binary opposites of imperial power and colony, or feudal lord and serfs, as suggested by frameworks such as digital colonialism and techno-feudalism. Likewise, traditional frameworks that associate power with property and territory, and innovation with progress, fail to account for the complex network of power relations among these and other giants and between corporate and political powers. 

This presentation, based on my recently published book, presents a unique and empirically grounded theory of how corporate power is structured and exercised with a focus on how Amazon, Microsoft and Google control not only AI value chains but growing portions of global capitalism from their clouds. Today’s top companies rely on digital technologies rented on cloud marketplaces to plan their production networks, replace and discipline workers and influence consumers. These firms extract value and capture knowledge from organisations within their own spheres of control by accepting a degree of subordination to cloud rulers. Control is not simply ceded to AI models, but to those who determine how the models are produced and sold. And these are, primarily, Amazon, Microsoft and Google through their clouds. 

State representatives change with elections. But Amazon, Microsoft and Google have become capitalism’s de facto unelected rulers and AI has only made them even more powerful. 

Dr. Cecilia Rikap is an Associate Professor in Economics and the Head of Research at the University College London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Cecilia’s work analyses corporate power and how knowledge extractivism leads to intellectual monopolisation. Her most recent research focuses on artificial intelligence, the cloud, Big Tech dominance, AI-driven geopolitical tensions, digital sovereignty and how digital dependence constrains development. She has published four books on these topics. The award-winning book Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered, The Digital Innovation Race co-authored the book, and her two most recent books, “Teoría de la Dependencia Digital. Soberanía y Desarrollo en el Capitalismo del Siglo XXI” and “The Rulers: Corporate Power in the Age of AI and the Cloud” that came out in 2026.