What if Australia depended on Russia for electricity?

Here’s a question: why would any reasonable nation choose to rely on getting their power entirely from a handful of countries thousands of miles away? They wouldn’t. For centuries, nations have focused on owning the critical infrastructure that powers their homes, businesses, and industries.

What if Australia depended on Russia for electricity? It would present a major vulnerability. Yet, a similar power dynamic has played out with the Internet over the past 50 years. Today, ten countries control 65% of data centers, with the United States accounting for more than half. Reliance on the internet is only poised to explode as technologies like large language models and agentic AI systems become ubiquitous in everything from healthcare to national defense to gaming. This is unsustainable.

TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) is the backbone of the modern internet and computer networks. And it’s struggling. TCP/IP dictates how data centers, edge-servers, and computers communicate, underpinning every website, email, and online transaction. Data is transmitted in discrete packets through a network of switches and routers, each using independent forwarding logic based on routing protocols. While intended to be decentralized, bottlenecks formed in places of high packet traffic, such as Internet Exchange Points (IXPs)—increasing congestion and latency. 

A Zoom call between users in Tanzania, for example, is likely to be routed through US-based servers, which can result in significant buffering, and a lower call quality.

Currently, data centers, server farms, and transglobal cables remain largely in the hands of American megacorporations like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Rebuilding the internet stack for the next century requires modularity, infinite scalability, and true decentralization—not just in ethos, but in practice. As AI-driven agents become critical in government and national security, nations will need to bring their AI infrastructure within their own borders. ThreeFold is a team of skilled infrastructure engineers—some of the first in building out cloud systems, data duplication technology, and networking architecture.

They have designed a unique system that is geo-aware, error-correcting, and dynamically sharded. Geo-awareness—ensuring a system operates in relation to its physical location—not only enables more efficient packet routing but also allows users to determine where their applications and data are stored. Using latency and distance as key factors, ThreeFold addresses this challenge. By building an entirely new stack from a bare Linux kernel, the team has created a self-healing system where users can control the redundancy of their data. Utilizing forward error-correcting codes, data is efficiently sharded and stored with built-in error resilience, ensuring that even in the event of partial data loss, it can be reconstructed without requiring retransmission. Even if encryption is compromised, only the user has access to the location will be the one capable of reassembling the data.

While initially building atop TCP/IP, ThreeFold uses advanced routing algorithms that dynamically calculate the most efficient path for packets while factoring in network congestion, node availability, and latency to mitigate bottlenecks caused by IXPs. Coupled with built-in geo-awareness, this system offers an uncompromising internet stack by rebuilding infrastructure from the ground up. The team has pioneered the world’s first fully decentralized compute and storage network to fuel a new agentic & geo-aware Internet. They are now launching a novel public-private partnership with the Government of Zanzibar. Dubbed the Zanzibar Autonomous Zone, this will allow millions of people and businesses to operate from a special economic zone (SEZ) running on a secure and autonomous architecture hosted locally. Because ThreeFold’s architecture is built to seamlessly interact with existing stack, these applications will be able to access other parts of the internet and from a user’s perspective will be indistinguishable.

We are at the precipice of an inflection point. 3.5 billion people currently lack proper internet access, AI agents are still in their infancy set to multiply by the millions, and nations and corporations are beginning to realize the urgent need to localize their digital infrastructure.

What is true for a country is also true for a company, community, family, or individual. It is imperative that we regain control over our data. By redefining IT infrastructure from its core, we can reshape the internet into what it was meant to be. It’s time to build for the next century—and ThreeFold offers a promising solution.

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